Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Summary

If your company isn't seeing great returns from its investment in AI, you might want to look at the humans tasked with deploying it and how you can motivate them. Right now, many employees fear AI-driven job losses and aren't well trained to use the tech, according to Forrester. The research and advisory biz says in its latest report that low employee readiness is the main thing holding back business success with workforce AI programs. According to its own data, Forrester believes 68 percent of organizations are using generative AI in deployed production applications, which sounds somewhat on the optimistic side to us. It claims that, among decision-makers, 81 percent say AI copilots are important for assisting employees. Workers must therefore adapt, it declares. This isn't happening. Using its own metric, the AI quotient (AIQ), to measure the readiness of individuals, teams, and organizations for AI, Forrester says employees in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Australia failed to progress meaningfully over the past year. There are two reasons put forward for why businesses aren't advancing as measured by Forrester's AIQ yardstick: One is that most organizations fail to effectively train their staff in the use of AI tools. The proportion of firms that say they offer internal AI training to non-technical employees grew slightly last year, from 47 percent in 2024 to 51 percent. Prompt engineering – a key skill for using generative AI tools – fared even worse, with just 23 percent of organizations saying they offered training for this. The second reason is that employee fears are stunting adoption. While few jobs were lost to AI in 2025 and future job losses are not expected to constitute a job apocalypse, worker anxiety regarding this is pervasive, Forrester says. There could be a good reason for this: public statements by CEOs saying that axing jobs is exactly what they want to do. A survey last year found that just over half of UK business leaders (51 percent) saw ...