As executives keep pushing to find the magic ROI of AI, a new Workday study suggests that employees aren’t being set up to succeed—thanks to archaic job structures.

Employees are using 2025 tools while stuck in 2015 job structures, as less than half of job roles have been updated to reflect AI capabilities, according to the study. Workday’s survey featured responses from 3,200 full-time employees at organizations with annual revenue of $100 million or more. 

Workers are rapidly being asked to apply human judgment and insight to a huge load of content that AI is generating for them, and historically, those types of skillsets take 10 years to build, said Aashna Kircher, group general manager for the office of the CHRO at Workday.

“Those are super high level skillsets,” Kircher said. “Right now, all the training that I see is very focused on how to use AI and not how to develop and apply discernment and judgment around the output that AI is driving. And I think that’s the disconnect for senior leaders.” 

Kircher said the first step to addressing this disconnect is analyzing each business function to figure out what the core skillsets associated with the job should be, and which parts of it should be automated. 

The study found that HR leaders bear a disproportionate share (38%) of the burden of “reworking AI”—fact-checking, reviewing, and editing copy that AI has produced. Those in IT roles, meanwhile, only represent 32% of those doing this work. 

That’s partly a function of the different work processes. “[IT roles] are using it as the starting point, as a thought partner, to accelerate the creativity and iteration process—but understanding that the outcome is imperfect and it doesn’t need the same level of scrutiny,” Kircher said. “Whereas in the context of something like HR, accuracy, tone, impact, how you frame things, matter so much.”

Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com

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