As AI Agents Fill the Workplace, Their Human Colleagues Stay Wary

As we wait for the promised evolution of AI to artificial general intelligence (AGI) which promises capabilities on par with human workers, the most sophisticated AI tools on market are AI agents. These semi-autonomous systems can make certain decisions by themselves and even carry out actions usually done by people in a digital environment. In January, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said AI agents could transform the workplace in 2025. With the year more than half over, is he right? New data from business leaders says maybe yes. But workers? They don’t trust ‘em. A survey of employees from around the world by California-based HR software firm Workday found upbeat results when it came to how workers feel about using buzzy AI agent tech. Amazingly, three-quarters of the survey respondents said they felt comfortable interacting with AI agents at work, news site ZDNet reported. That’s a really high comfort level with what is very much a breakthrough innovation. The numbers tell a very different story when it comes to taking orders from an AI agent, however. Only 30 percent of respondents said they’d be comfortable being bossed by a digital “colleague.” Just 24 percent of people felt okay with the idea of running agents inside a company without a human monitoring the situation. ZDNet noted parallels between this outcome and recent research from Stanford University which found a certain level of trust of AI agents, but only for very basic tasks. Anecdotally, this should be reassuring. In June, two researchers from leading AI firm Anthropic warned that they could foresee a future where AIs make decisions and employees would have to blindly follow them as a kind of “meat robot.” The fact that so few people would blindly follow an agent’s instructions without at least applying a smidge of critical thinking should be reassuring. Trusting the tools of the workplace is a critical — we’ve all used the “good” printer in the office when we needed an urgent copy of an important report, rather than relying on the nearby one. It seems the same is true of AI agents. People are happy to embrace them for simple tasks, but are much more wary about following critical decisions made by an AI tool. But trust builds over time, and Workday’s data found evidence of this in attitudes to AI, because as employees work more with agents, the more they trust the system’s outputs. Part of this trust may come from the fact that 90 percent of the survey respondents said they felt AI agents would boost productivity — any tool that’s that useful can’t be bad, can it? But even here, it seems workers are already quite savvy about the risks of AI systems, with many respondents to the survey concerned that overreliance on AI tools could lead to slips in their own critical thinking, a workplace built less around human interactions, and that the productivity boost from the AI may tempt managers to up their demands. Another worry workers have about agent AIs that may play into considerations of employee trust is that the new technology may steal their jobs. This worry may be borne out, as indicated by a recent report about the advertising industry, which shows that the industry is actually dumping entry-level workers. Data show 6.5 percent of all jobs in the industry were held by people aged 20 to 24. In 2019, that cohort represented 10.5 percent of the ad industry. AI’s role in this decline can’t be ignored, industry news site AdWeek contends. Why should you care about this? Because you may have rolled out agent-based AI tools to your workforce, and then sat back — confident in your employees’ ability to make the most of this smart tech, and reap the benefits of all that extra productivity. The reality may be slightly different. It may be worth running an audit of how comfortable your workers are with this tech, and also educating them about how you would actually like them to use these AI agents. Reassuring them that you won’t replace them with a pile of silicon chips may also be a good idea. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON