AI adoption in the workplace jumps sharply, yet most employees lack dedicated training time
A Workera survey of 1,000 US salaried professionals finds that 67.8% now use AI tools beyond ChatGPT at least a few days per week, up from 39.9% a year earlier. Despite this surge, 56.4% of employees report having no time allocated for upskilling, and many lack necessary resources. The report's author advises leaders to carve out explicit time and psychological safety for AI experimentation to close the skills gap.
The Workera survey, conducted in July 2026 among 1,000 salaried professionals at US firms with at least 5,000 employees, shows AI tool usage beyond ChatGPT nearly doubled year over year. Yet training infrastructure lags: 84.3% of workers devote five hours or fewer weekly to skill development, and 42.5% cite insufficient learning materials as a primary barrier.
Workera CEO Kian Katanforoosh notes that last year's focus was adoption and access, while this year's emphasis has shifted to outcomes and actions, creating added pressure. Although nearly 60% of employees received AI-specific training offers in the past year, companies still struggle to pair those offerings with dedicated work time and psychological safety for experimentation.
This gap between rapid AI adoption and inadequate upskilling time could widen productivity disparities across industries, as workers who lack structured learning opportunities may fall behind peers at better-resourced organizations. Employees may face mounting pressure to self-train outside work hours, potentially affecting job satisfaction and retention. Companies that fail to address this disconnect risk making costly hiring decisions rather than developing internal talent, while those that carve out explicit training time could gain a competitive advantage in an AI-driven economy.