Companies are moving quickly to adopt AI, but many HR leaders aren’t convinced their managers are ready to help employees navigate the change.
A Gallup survey of CHROs found that 99% consider AI somewhat or very important to their organization’s strategy. Yet 50% said they were not very confident or not at all confident in their managers’ ability to guide employees in using AI at work.
That gap could matter as organizations rely more heavily on managers to determine how employees experience AI in their daily work.
AI Is Changing Workplace Culture In Both Directions
Gallup’s Q1 2026 workforce research found that employees in organizations using AI were less likely to say their workplace culture had remained unchanged over the previous year.
Among employees at organizations that had adopted AI, 24% said their culture had improved, while 25% said it had worsened. Another 51% said it had stayed about the same.
Nearly half of employees who experienced cultural change at an AI-using organization said technology advancements such as automation, robotics or AI were responsible for that change to some or a great deal. The results suggest AI adoption itself does not determine whether employees view workplace changes positively.
Managers Make A Difference
Gallup found a substantial difference in how employees experience AI depending on their manager’s approach. Among employees who strongly agreed that their manager champions AI, 33% said AI had transformed how work gets done at their organization. That fell to 4% among employees who did not strongly agree that their manager champions AI.
Manager support also correlated with employees’ views of workplace culture. 31% of employees who strongly agreed their manager supports their team’s AI use said their culture had improved over the past year, compared with 21% of those who did not strongly agree.
The difference was even larger for employees reporting a significant improvement: 9% versus 3%.
Companies Are Training Managers
Organizations are beginning to respond to the management gap. In Gallup’s CHRO survey, 57% said their organizations provide AI training for people managers.
Other approaches include peer learning, reported by 78% of CHROs, while 62% said their organizations are creating AI centers of excellence or internal AI champion programs.
The challenge is that managers are already responsible for supporting employees, communicating organizational changes and managing increasingly large teams. Adding AI adoption to that workload without providing sufficient resources could make implementation harder.
For companies investing heavily in AI, the findings point to a less technical part of the rollout that could determine whether employees actually embrace the technology: the manager standing between the AI strategy and the people expected to use it.
