MicroStockHub/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images
Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Despite mass AI adoption, workers’ confidence in the tech fell.
- One factor could be a lack of training.
- Companies are looking for ways to mitigate frustration.
For every process or workflow where AI saves time and boosts efficiency, there are a half dozen that leave Tabby Farrar’s team feeling like the technology is useless.
Farrar is head of search at the UK-based SEO and web design agency Candour. Digital marketing, like nearly every other industry, is heatedly debating the topic of AI. And though her team is keen to embrace the benefits of working faster and more efficiently, and of clawing back time otherwise spent on less interesting tasks, it doesn’t always work that way.
Also: 95% of business applications of AI have failed. Here’s why
AI can generate product lifestyle imagery for clients who don’t have any, but it hallucinates or misses key points when creating executive summaries of data. Refining a prompt to help assign categories to datasets could take so long, Farrar might as well have done the job manually.
“As a manager, I’m trying to get the team more on board with AI stuff, because it’s the future of so many industries,” Farrar said. On the other hand, “There’s just so many people going, ‘I have lost two hours of my day trying to make this thing work.'”
Farrar and her team aren’t the only ones navigating the gap between what AI promises and what it can actually do — and perhaps losing faith in the meantime.
Worker anxiety will cause real problems
A January study from workforce solutions firm ManpowerGroup found that for the first time in three years, workers’ confidence in AI declined, dropping 18% while adoption grew by 13% year over year. The divergence in those numbers may not only signal that the honeymoon phase with AI is over, but also serve as a wake-up call for organizations about how they implement AI tools in the workplace.
“You can’t have an intimidated workforce and be fully productive. That anxiety is going to cause real problems,” said Mara Stefan, VP of global insights for ManpowerGroup.
Other studies paint similar portraits of disconnect. An EY report from November found that while 9 in 10 employees use AI at work, only 28% of organizations can translate that into “high-value outcomes.”
“Our research shows why: Employees may be saving a few hours here and there, but nothing that fundamentally changes how work gets done or how the business performs,” the report said.
For some, trying to prevent this erosion of workers’ confidence is a part-time job.
Also: 5 ways you can stop testing AI and start scaling it responsibly in 2026
Randall Tinfow, CEO of REACHUM, an AI-powered learning platform based in Scranton, Pa., estimates he spends about 20 hours of his 70-hour work week vetting AI tools and partners, so as not to turn them loose on his employees indiscriminately.
While platforms like Claude Code are saving software developers at REACHUM significant time, not everything is as effective. Tinfow sees a disparity between how some AI tools are marketed and what they can actually do.
Even working at a company built around AI, Tinfow’s team has run into issues with tasks like text generation in images, where certain AI tools just didn’t deliver.
“There’s so much noise, and I don’t want our team to get distracted by that, so I’m the one who will take a look at something, decide whether it is reasonable or garbage, and then give it to the team to work with,” Tinfow said.
Boosting confidence
That misalignment of expectations and reality could be one key reason for the confidence drop, said Kristin Ginn, founder of trnsfrmAItn, an organization that works with companies on AI adoption, focusing on the human workforce involved.
Marketing demos make it all look easy, but business leaders have to make sure workers understand the trial-and-error and refinement that may lie ahead.
There’s also a psychological element at play. ManpowerGroup’s study found that 89% of respondents feel comfortable in their current role. For many, they’ve done their jobs one way for a long time.
Also: 5 ways rules and regulations can help guide your AI innovation
“If you’re now starting to look at how you can use AI for the same task, you all of a sudden have to put a lot more mental effort into trying to figure out how to do this in a completely different way,” Ginn said, “That loss of the routine, the confidence of how I’m doing it, that can also just go back to the human nature to avoid change.”
Additionally, Stefan discussed the role adequate training plays in maintaining confidence. More than half of respondents (56%) reported no recent training or access to mentorship (57%).
“The organizations and the companies that figure out how to address that, how to make employees feel better about the use of technology, the training, and the context… those are the organizations that are going to benefit the most,” Stefan said.
Looking for gems
Back at the digital marketing agency Candour, Farrar said the company has a variety of tactics to help balance the quest for innovation with the day-to-day challenges of a technology that still has a way to go.
Candour builds in extra time to account for the fact that everyone is learning, frames experiments as “test and learn” to mitigate stress, and has appointed a “champion” to stay abreast of developments in AI. The agency’s chief marketing officer has led training sessions, and Farrar also does regular check-ins with her team. She’s open with them about feeling frustrated sometimes, too.
Also: Turn AI chaos into a career opportunity by preparing for these 4 scenarios
And some efforts have proven fruitful, like the creation of a Gemini Gem trained on brand and tone-of-voice guidelines that can generate quotes a client can then tweak and approve for use in media. Candour’s innovation lead is building tools that will more specifically meet the company’s needs using APIs from companies like OpenAI. Farrar described how quickly their attitude toward AI images changed after the launch of Google’s Nano Banana — for the better.
Still, there’s a long road ahead.
“If I am going to sideline some of my work over to these tools,” Farrar said, “I want to be able to trust that it’s going to do as good a job as I would do.”
