One explanation that came up again and again was incomplete adoption among employees. Many professionals are understandably worried about what these tools will mean for their jobs, or at least skeptical of their usefulness as AI slop abounds. To bulldoze through this hesitation, bosses have stepped up the pressure, making AI use mandatory and incorporating it into performance reviews. But a number of executives at the roundtable advised against strong-arming.
Some 12% of employed adults say they use AI daily in their job, according to a Gallup Workforce survey conducted this fall of more than 22,000 U.S. workers. The survey found roughly one-quarter say they use AI at least frequently, which is defined as at least a few times a week, and nearly half say they use it at least a few times a year.
Results of the survey, conducted in April, have been compiled into GitLab's 2024 Global DevSecOps Report, which was announced June 25. Among the findings, 78% of respondents said they are currently using AI in software development or plan to in the next two years, an increase from 64% of respondents who said they were using or planning to use AI in development last year.
Big companies are busy hiring chief AI officers and setting up tiger teams to pilot agentic products. However, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman says this overlooks where automation actually pays off - in the "unglamorous layer" of day-to-day work. Speaking with AI engineer Parth Patil on his "Possible" podcast, Hoffman said a company's AI transformation involves employees "being able to talk to each other about it and do collective learning."
"For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread," Nadella said, as quoted by the FT. The "tell-tale sign of if it's a bubble," he added, would be if only tech companies were benefitting from the rise of AI. He gave the example of a pharmaceutical company using AI to accelerate drug trials;
Hiring in 2026 won't look much like hiring even two years ago. If you don't pay attention, you will get left behind. I was a retained search consultant for 25-plus years. I've written executive and board résumés for the last 10 years. I've never seen so much change in candidate sourcing happen so quickly. CEO priorities and expectations have shifted. AI is reshaping how candidates get surfaced. Résumé sameness has skyrocketed. Candidate shortlist cycles have accelerated.
When ChatGPT was first released to the world at the end of 2022, Kristin Ginn, the product marketing lead for AI adoption and usage at Microsoft and founder of the consultancy TrnsfrmAItn, started playing around with it. She explored how she could use AI both at work and in her personal life, and realized just how powerful the technology would be.
In the fall, roughly three years after generative artificial intelligence tools went mainstream and some higher education institutions began partnering with tech companies, researchers surveyed 1,960 staff, administrators and faculty across more than 1,800 public and private institutions about AI's relationship to their work. Ninety-two percent of respondents said their institution has a work-related AI strategy-which includes piloting AI tools, evaluating both opportunities and risks and encouraging use of AI tools. And while the vast majority of respondents (89 percent) said they aren't required to use AI tools for work, 86 percent said they want to or will continue to use AI tools in the future.
In his telling, AI has yet to graduate from pilot programs into anything that materially reshapes how marketing departments are staffed, structured or paid. Until that changes, agency chiefs can stop bracing for a shift to outcome-based compensation. CMOs, he said, are still buying time and headcount. "Without naming names, I can remember a real situation where the marketer said 'of course we'll move to an output model' and then you get into a conversation with their procurement people and they're just worried about getting caught out," he continued. Which, in plain terms, means they're worried about paying agencies more than they have to.
Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, value from AI investments has been slow to emerge and worries that we're in an AI bubble are growing. Yet according to responses to this year's annual AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey, companies are undaunted. Virtually every data and AI leader participating in this year's survey believes that AI is a high priority for their organization, has plans to spend more on it, and confirms that their company is getting measurable business value from their AI investments.
AI often sparks strong reactions, with people predicting either a near-term utopia - or the end of the world as we know it. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy told Business Insider that individuals on the hype end of the spectrum tend to jump quickly to promises of unlimited prosperity. The CEO said that the other extreme includes those who believe AI will lead to a doomsday scenario.
despite one person in six now using generative AI (genAI) tools, there exists what it described as a "widening divide." The adoption rate in nations that are situated in the region known as the Global North, a term used for developed nations regardless of their geographic location, is at 24.7% of the working age population, far higher than the 14.1% figure in the Global South, those countries either under development or least developed.
"What is AI? How are we going to provide training to both the developers and the trainers - train the trainers, if you will - and employees? What areas can we leverage AI? What risks [are there] with AI?"
Microsoft CEO and head AI peddler Satya Nadella wants you to know that it's time for the next phase of AI acceptance, where we focus on how humans are empowered by tools and agents and how we deploy resources to support this growth. Amid doubts that revenue from Microsoft Copilot subscriptions and cloud AI services will compensate for data center capital expenditures any time soon, Satya has some incentive to convince customers and investors that AI is a financially intelligent long-term bet.
Nearly all corporate workers face mental health challenges at work. And in 2025, unprecedented, lightning-fast developments in AI, unending widespread layoffs and broader political turmoil roiled workers' emotional well-being. Many workers have been left burned out, anxious, and filled with dread. But it's not all bad-in some corners of the workforce, each seismic disruption this year brought with it discourse around the problem, as well as some leaders and workers staying committed to safeguarding mental health in the face of constant change.
Yet across sectors, many organizations are reaching the same conclusion. Adoption is proving harder than invention, especially for general-purpose technologies, as it once was for electricity. As a result, AI adoption remains on the sidelines. Systems exist, but changing how work actually gets done is far more difficult. The constraint is no longer technological capability. It is whether institutions and organizations are prepared to absorb AI.
Last week, shares of Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR) lost 0.84% over past five trading sessions after gaining 6.56% the five prior. The damage from the AI-fueled sell-off that began in late October and carried deep into November appears to be in the rearview mirror, and the stock is now up nearly 151% in 2025, including a gain of 38.43% over the past six months. Since going public on Oct. 2, 2020, it has gained an eye-popping 1,951.20%.
Agoda's AI Developer Report 2025 shows that AI has become a mainstream tool for developers in Southeast Asia and India, delivering real productivity gains while raising new questions about reliability, skills, and organisational readiness. The report finds that AI adoption is nearly universal: 95% of developers in Southeast Asia and India use AI tools weekly, and more than half keep an AI assistant open while they work. Developers report clear speed improvements-over 90% say AI makes them faster-but describe the impact as steady, incremental gains rather than dramatic automation of their jobs.
For the past three years, AI 's breakout moment has happened almost entirely through text. We type a prompt, get a response, and move to the next task. While this intuitive interaction style turned chatbots into a household tool overnight, it barely scratches the surface of what the most advanced technology of our time can actually do. This disconnect has created a significant gap in how consumers utilize AI.
