Some weeks feel like whiplash for people leaders. Just as new retention plans roll out, half the company starts rethinking their life purpose. Just as hybrid schedules settle in, along comes AI.
But AI isn't just another disruption: it's a moment of reinvention.
If your company is investing in AI but seeing uneven results, it may not just be a technology problem. While technology may still be evolving in some areas, a challenge also lies in adoption. In many organizations, that breakdown happens along the lines of hierarchy, trust, and communication, not just code or capability.
This is HR's opportunity to lead the transformation.
A recent BambooHR study shows a stark divide. While 77% of companies either encourage or don't restrict AI use, adoption varies dramatically across where people sit in the org chart. Leadership teams are eager and early adopters, yet enthusiasm plummets to only 17% of individual contributors.
The report also found that 23% of individual contributors (ICs) do not disclose their AI use, compared to only 6% of VP and C-suite executives, indicating a more negative stigma associated with AI among ICs.
This isn't a skill gap. It's a trust gap, and it's leaving workers behind.
Similarly, half of employees believe they can detect AI-generated content, but only 30% actually can. A staggering 70% of employees couldn't accurately identify AI-generated content when presented with two human-written prompts and two AI-written prompts. The fear of being judged, penalized, or replaced by AI is real, especially for underrepresented groups, like women, who use it less. That fear discourages innovation and stifles opportunity.
HR is often the first to recognize an organization's need to unlearn patterns that feel like muscle memory. You create the systems -- onboarding, reviews, benefits, policies -- that people rely on to function. But when the game changes, old instincts can hold companies back. The shift from annual reviews to continuous feedback didn't just require new tools. It required a mindset shift.
The same is true for AI.
As an organization, we decided early on to invest in AI, not just to experiment with tools and foster innovation, but to set the foundation for responsible adoption across the business. As we enter the phase of company-wide enablement, we created three cross-functional groups to ensure AI isn't just a tech conversation, but a people conversation too. Divisional Champions help each team discover use cases that streamline their work. An AI Enablement Council shares learnings across the company, ensuring adoption doesn't stall in silos, and our Responsible AI Council focuses on mitigating risk -- surfacing issues such as bias or misuse so we can train with confidence. By embedding HR leaders throughout these groups, we've been able to put trust at the center of our AI journey. As a result, we now see more than three-quarters of our employees confident in using AI within their roles.