Gallup recently surveyed nearly 24,000 employees in the US about AI at work. The headline number backs up exactly what I keep hearing: 46% of employees who have AI tools available to them are choosing not to use them.
The reason is annoyingly simple. They prefer doing things the way they've always done them. The tools work fine. Nobody gave them a reason to switch.
What actually separates teams that use AI from teams that don't
Gallup went deeper than the headline. They looked at what makes the difference between teams where AI sticks and teams where it gathers dust.
The single biggest factor is whether the manager actively supports it.
When a manager backs AI adoption, 78% of the team uses it regularly. When they don't, that drops to 44%. That's a 34-point gap from one variable. Same tools, same people, same training. The only thing that changed is whether someone in charge said "we're doing this" and then followed through on it.
In public sector organisations that have adopted AI, the pattern holds. 65% of employees in high-support environments use AI frequently, compared to 37% in low-support ones. Total use is slightly higher under high support too, 88% versus 78%.
So the question isn't whether your team can use AI. It's whether your managers are creating an environment where using AI is just how things get done now.
The 10% problem
There's another number in the Gallup data that deserves attention. Only 10% of businesses say AI has actually changed how work gets done across the organisation.
That gap between "we have AI tools" and "AI has changed how we work" is worth being honest about. One person using AI to draft emails a bit faster is tinkering. A team rebuilding how client onboarding works from scratch using AI, that changes the business. Most firms I speak to are stuck somewhere in the middle. They've bought the tools, a few enthusiasts on the team are getting value, but nothing has structurally changed about how the work flows through the business. The processes are the same, the handoffs are the same, the bottlenecks are the same.
What to actually do about this
The practical takeaway from this data is fairly direct. Pick one workflow. Tell the team you're rebuilding it with AI. Show them how. Support them through it.
You want an AI-plus mindset, where the process gets rebuilt with AI at the core, rather than bolting a chatbot onto the end of an existing workflow and hoping something improves.
And then the manager piece. Based on everything Gallup found, this is where the real difference sits. Get your team leads involved. Make it their responsibility to encourage and support AI use. Run a session together. Rebuild one workflow end to end. Measure what changes.
The RAMP data adds more context
RAMP, which tracks corporate card spending across thousands of businesses, just released their April AI index. 50.4% of businesses on RAMP are now paying for AI tools. That was 35% a year ago.
The biggest predictor of whether a business uses AI? Who funded them. VC-backed firms are at 80% adoption. PE-backed at 64%. Everyone else hovers around 45%.
You don't need outside money to adopt AI. But the firms at 80% didn't get there by accident. They were deliberate about it. They picked a tool, picked a workflow, and made it part of how they operate.
If you run a professional services firm with 30 to 70 people, the question isn't whether to start. The majority of your competitors already have. The question is whether your team is actually using what you've bought them, and whether your managers are leading the charge.
If your team has AI tools but nothing has structurally changed about how they work, that's exactly the gap I help firms close. Book a discovery call and we'll look at where to start.
