Despite growing anxiety about AI's impact on jobs, few workers appear to be resisting agents.
Only 2% of tech leaders report significant pushback from workers, according to new data from KPMG, as organizations rapidly deploy agents to automate tasks, support decision-making, and coordinate work across teams. Employee adoption of AI agents has already reached 68%, the firm found.
Instead, the findings point to a different challenge: helping workers keep pace with the technology. Among leaders who reported employee resistance, 78% said it stemmed from a lack of skills and fears about job security. More than half also cited concerns around trust and safety, followed by worries that AI is increasing workloads.
These fears are emerging at a time when employers are increasingly citing AI in layoff announcements and entry-level hiring continues to contract. As companies race to deploy AI across their organizations, workers are left trying to make sense of what the technology will mean for their careers.
KPMG's findings suggest that companies have largely moved beyond the question of whether employees will use AI. Instead, the workplace is entering a new phase where AI adoption is expected.
That pressure is already taking shape. Nearly half of tech leaders say AI literacy is a workforce priority, KPMG found, and many companies are introducing mandatory training, usage requirements, and performance metrics tied to AI adoption.
"As the majority signal growing adoption and acknowledge expectations for employees to become AI fluent, it's critical to rethink how tasks are executed by embedding human-machine collaboration into everyday work," said Kevin Bogle, KPMG's US advisory leader for technology, media and telecommunications.
Companies face other hurdles as they scale AI. KPMG found organizations are deploying AI without full visibility into costs, with average AI investments projected to reach $269 million over the next 12 months. As spending rises, tech leaders say that data privacy and a shift toward lower-cost, higher-performing models are shaping their AI strategies over the next six months.
Our Deeper View #
Worker attitudes toward AI agents may change as the technology matures. Despite the hype around autonomous digital employees, companies are still deploying the technology cautiously. A separate KPMG study found that 63% of organizations require human review of AI agent outputs, meaning they can't be taken at face value. Meanwhile, deployments remain limited to low-risk tasks such as triaging IT support tickets or answering HR questions. In other words, the gap between the industry's vision of AI agents and today's reality remains wide. Workers may be embracing AI agents today because they still function more like assistants than replacements. But as companies release tools that make agents perform more like coworkers, such as Anthropic's Claude Tag, that mindset could shift.