A significant 65% of employees said they are excited about using AI at work, according to a survey by Gartner.
While C-suite executives often attribute AI’s lack of added business value to workforce resistance to adopting AI tools, that isn’t the case.
According to a Gartner survey of 2 986 employees in July 2025, 37% of employees do not use AI even though they can because their co-workers are not using it.
Gartner research indicates that the root issue is often executive urgency leading to rushed implementations of AI with insufficient consideration of workforce implications.
“Often AI deployment decisions are being made without any involvement of HR,” says Eser Rizagolu, senior director, analyst at the Gartner HR Practice.
“This leads to poor adoption, misaligned expectations between employees and executives, and ultimately, organizations not realizing significant business value from AI.”
To gain the desired value from AI investments, Gartner recommends CHROs take three actions to reimagine their organization’s AI deployment strategy:
- Reframe AI governance to focus not only on compliance and information security, but also on planning for impacts on the employee experience.
- Identify digitally curious and collaborative employees to pilot AI tools with and target for AI learning.
- Segment employees by their attitudes and behaviors toward AI to craft personalized learning journeys that create a culture with AI-forward work behaviors.
As a result of HR being left out of AI strategy discussions, CHROs have to reactively manage the impacts of AI deployment. To avoid negative impacts of AI on the employee experience, CHROs need to collaborate with digital workplace, security, legal, and business units within enterprisewide AI governance teams.
“To convince the C-suite of HR’s critical role in AI governance, CHROs should position AI as a workforce issue and communicate HR’s ability to detect risks while serving as a partner that ensures AI tools drive productivity, engagement, and retention,” says Rizagolu.
While the governance team is stress-testing AI solutions, CHROs should be coordinating with HR business partners (HRBPs) and business leaders to identify which employees should be drafted to pilot AI solutions in the proof of value (POV) stage.
The best options for the POV stage are the employees that not only collaborate easily with peers but are digitally curious.
CHROs can identify employees who fall within four worker archetypes that can get the most benefit from AI:
- Consumer: Ingests a large amount of data and information and needs to distill it to gain insights for informed decision making.
- Communicator: Takes information and crafts messaging through offers, news, actions and other communications.
- Coordinator: Organizes and prioritizes information from multiple sources to improve workflows.
- Creator: Transforms data and information from one format to another.
Once CHROs have created one or more cohorts of employees with a mix of these four archetypes, they must enable them to collaborate, using AI to improve individual and team-based objectives.
After AI use cases have been properly stress-tested and meet the requirements of the governance team and organisational value needs, they are ready to be scaled across the organisation.
The CHRO should then survey POV employees and analyze AI usage data. This feedback can be used to assess if the quality and timeliness of deliverables are improved, compared to those without AI.
“To achieve high employee adoption and effective use of AI solutions, CHROs and their teams should segment employees by adoption attitudes and behaviours using surveys and usage data,” say Rizagolu.