Dive Brief:
- Workers don’t know how to use artificial intelligence tools regardless of how much money organizations have invested on pilots, deployments and licenses, according to new research from Forrester.
- Forrester measured employees’ understanding of AI tools using an artificial intelligence quotient, or AIQ, and the resulting data was “alarming,” J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester said in a blog post about the research. The results should provide “a wake-up call to the vast majority of employers,” Gownder said.
- This learning stagnation impedes productivity, and that the fault lies with companies, said Gownder, who is one of the researchers. “It’s you — the employer — who hasn’t yet cultivated a learning and engagement environment sufficient to helping employees attain these skills,” Gownder said.
Dive Insight:
The inability of employers to successfully train their employees with the understanding, skills and ethics to navigate AI tools has become “a bottleneck that inhibits productivity and return on investment,” Gownder said.
As an example, the percentage of employees who understood prompt engineering, which is integral to using tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Google Workspace, increased by only 4 percentage points from 22% in 2024 to 26% in 2025, per the report.
Many employers have rolled out at least some elements of AI, believing that the technology is easy for employees to use, Gownder said. However, many organizations are deploying AI without investing in workforce training, and as a result, low AIQ “is stymieing potential productivity,” he said.
While employees with higher AIQ are more effective at using AI tools to drive productivity, workers with low AIQ might not use the tools at all or might use them incorrectly and see losses in productivity, the researcher said. Many workers also may not know when to question AI outputs and may not know how to use AI ethically. “It’s a recipe for them to get frustrated and abandon using the tools altogether in too many cases,” he said.
A recent report from employee experience platform Culture Amp found that 96% of C-suite leaders expected AI to increase output, while 77% of employees said AI tools actually increased their workload.
Meanwhile, when managers handed out AI-generated “workslop,” meaning work that looked polished but was inaccurate or sloppy, 85% of employees said it damaged their trust in leadership, according to a report from resume templates service Zety.