80 Percent of Workers Reject AI in the Office, What's Going On?

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been hailed as a major revolution in the world of work. However, the reality on the ground shows a different direction.

Instead of being welcomed enthusiastically, many workers are beginning to quietly resist the adoption of AI in their workplaces.

A latest global report from SAP subsidiary through WalkMe, involving 3,750 workers and executives in 14 countries, reveals a shocking fact. More than 54 percent of workers chose to avoid company AI tools in the last 30 days and completed work manually.

Even, 33 percent did not use AI at all. This means that almost 8 out of 10 enterprise workers are actively avoiding or rejecting the technology that the company has already purchased.

This phenomenon is in stark contrast to a few years ago when “shadow AI” exploded. The report mentions that employees secretly used chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to speed up work.

A MIT study even found that workers in more than 90 percent of companies used personal chatbot accounts without permission, while only 40 percent of companies provided official large language model (LLM) subscriptions. At that time, workers called it a way to complete work, not a violation.

However, the direction has now changed. Fear of AI’s impact has led many workers to stop using the technology altogether. Even, only 9 percent of workers trust AI for complex business decisions, far compared to 61 percent of executives, creating a trust gap of 52 points.

In the same report, it was also found that 88 percent of executives consider workers to already have sufficient tools, but only 21 percent of workers agree. The world of work seems divided into two different realities.

Economist Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University is even sceptical about AI’s impact. “AI does not deliver results,” he stated, as quoted from Fortune on Monday, 13 April 2026.

“Welcome to the real world. Forget the AI bubble. You know, it doesn’t deliver results. You see all the surveys and yes, everyone uses it a little, but if you dig deeper, it doesn’t help much,” he explained.

Meanwhile, WalkMe CEO Dan Adika explained that the main problem is not just the technology, but the workers’ capabilities. “We give every employee a sports car, a Ferrari, but they don’t know how to drive. They don’t have fuel in some cases, which is context. The way to drive is the prompt,” he said.