Over the past few years, organizations have begun aggressively driving AI adoption across their workforces, expanding access to tools, encouraging experimentation, and, in some cases, mandating use. However, redesigning operating models, ways of working, and the leadership needed to guide this shift has lagged behind the demands of this new era.
That gap is becoming the new fault line in the next phase of AI.
Across industries, leaders are discovering that deployment alone won’t deliver results. It’s one thing to roll out access to a new tool, but rewiring workflows, decision-making, accountability, and expectations is much harder, and far more consequential.
A new IBM study, Where AI breaks— or breaks through, shows that nearly two-thirds of executives say AI is reshaping roles and workflows. Yet many organizations have been slow to redesign the systems that support that shift, creating a widening disconnect between leaders’ perception of AI progress and how employees actually experience it.
While 78% of executives say employees are involved in designing AI-enabled workflows, only half of employees agree. At the same time, leaders report role transformation at twice the rate employees experience it, pointing to steady progress embedding AI into operations, yet just 17% of employees say AI is part of their daily work.
