At a time when humans perceive artificial intelligence as a threat to their jobs, how do organisations make sure that their employees are not antsy, but also try to keep up with technological advancements? At the recent SAP Connect event in Las Vegas, there were some answers.
Autumn Krauss, Chief Scientist, Market Insights & Customer Engagement. SAP SuccessFactors, has some interesting data that may work for enterprises. Trained as an occupational psychologist, she brings these chops to understand the impact of AI and technology among human resources, among other things. If you are in the process of reimagining your people strategies for a high-performing, future-ready workforce, she has some tips, borne out by data.
She says SAP surveyed over 4,000 managers and employees globally about how AI is reshaping workplace dynamics and HR practices, and the results, well, paint a complicated picture. According to her, at the heart of the issue is what she calls the ‘AI Literacy Divide’. The survey showed that the biggest factor influencing the workforce’s opinions of AI is their level of AI literacy, or ‘their ability to detect, understand, and evaluate the technology.’ Compared to people with high AI literacy, people with low AI literacy were over six times more likely to feel apprehensive, seven times more likely to feel afraid, and over eight times more likely to feel distressed about using AI at work. Additionally, nearly 70% of people with high AI literacy expected to see positive outcomes from the use of AI at work, compared to 29% of people with low AI literacy.
“So, I would argue that perhaps we’ve focused too much on the skills of AI and things such as prompt engineering, or how to work with specific tools. Organisations do not really factor in AI literacy, which is the basic idea. It might sound like a simple concept, but it actually is well grounded in academic research, has very specific components. We have been measuring it with our studies, and we found that AI literacy is actually the most predictive factor for attitudes towards deployment of AI,” Ms. Krauss explains.
AI literacy is agnostic to the tools. It’s simple, she adds: “I understand how enough about how AI works, I can detect when I’m interacting with AI, I can figure out when it’s a good use or not a good use; and I can understand the ethical aspects. You’re just getting deeper understanding and comfort, versus trying to technically know how to engineer Chat GPT prompts.”
“So, I think that’s the starting position that would try to allay some of those resistance factors that we see amidst the workforce. Naturally, it also plays a role in job security. One specific measure that people are worried about is whether automation and technology will take their job. The incidence of this was about 31% of our sample surveyed,” she explains.
It is her belief that HR not communicating clearly about how new work is going to look like to employees is a missed opportunity. “Instead, often HR replaces clear messaging with platitudes such as: AI will take those tasks you don’t want to do anyway, and then you’ll get all this meaningful work instead.”
No doubt, AI will also evolve over time. “Therefore, this idea that we’re going to do this one-time strategic work redesign and everyone will be in the new roles and now we’re all happy and it’s all working out will not appease any one,” she stresses. Instead, she advises approaching this model differently, “counselling HR, to think of this as dynamic work redesign, where we’re constantly looking at the roles and the role of technology and trying to figure out how these jobs can be reshaped in a much more dynamic manner, because this isn’t a once and done initiative.”
Another issue that she turns her guns on is employee morale. “Earlier this year, we wanted to identify what we thought were the current trends that HR needed to prioritise for 2025. Number one on that list was employee disconnect. What we organisational psychologists do is study what ‘good work’ looks like. We think about how that strategic work redesign could be not only beneficial for work output and outcomes, but also as a lever to try to improve employee disconnect and morale..”
Ms. Krauss adds that research has shown that on average, employees are saying that they’re saving about 75 minutes a day from using AI. This went up from 52 minutes, when surveyed 10 months ago. But the question remains how much they are benefitting atually from AI. “We’ve currently studied this and found that 63% of people have said that the time that they spend learning how to use AI tools was more than the time they saved by using them. That speaks to how we’ve rolled out these tools. We have to look at it like giving access to the tools, and creating the dynamic: ‘Just give it a shot and see how you go.’
“In this context, I’d like to mention the concept of Work Slop,” she says. “Work slop” is a term coined by the Harvard Business Review to indicate AI-generated content that lacks substance, and requires someone to correct or redo it. The HBR notes that this erodes trust, hinders productivity, and shifts the burden of work to others. It could come from poor prompt engineering, but also nascent large language models and insufficient training, but essentially a failure that can be costly. A recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organisations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. In this context, organisations will have to be the change champions, have pilot programmes, continuous support and feedback, besides evaluation of the performance of the technology that has been deployed, Ms. Krauss notes.
(The writer was in Las Vegas at the invitation of SAP)
Published – November 18, 2025 04:28 pm IST
