A study published last Thursday by the Adecco Group surveyed 2,000 C-suite executives across 13 countries on how they are managing the arrival of AI agents in the workplace. The report is called “The Human Premium” and its headline finding was predictable: nearly half those surveyed expect AI agents embedded in their workflows within 12 months.
But there’s a more disturbing finding buried three paragraphs down. Only 36% of executives say their talent strategy demonstrates that AI will create opportunities for workers. Fewer than 4 in 10 are involving employees in redesigning the jobs AI is impacting. Most workers under these executives have no idea what is coming next.
This is not a new gap
Microsoft published a study earlier this month surveying 20,000 AI users in 10 different countries. It found that only 13% of workers are actually rewarded when they redesign their work around AI agents in the workplace. Employees are already moving faster than the organizations around them. Microsoft called it the Transformation Paradox: the constraint is no longer what people can do, it is how work is structured around them.
While that finding got coverage, most of it focused on the Frontier Firms pulling ahead, the growth of agent deployments, and the productivity upside. The part about organizations being the bottleneck attracted less attention.
Employees don’t trust AI
Last November, Deloitte’s TrustID Index tracked employee sentiment on AI through the summer of 2025. Trust in agentic AI dropped 89% between May and July, concentrated in the months when agents began making decisions that workers had previously been in charge of.
Workers were not being vague about what they needed. They want to know what is happening to their work before being asked to trust the tools doing it. That data has yet to produce any notable impact on how companies approach job redesign.
Deployed Without Warning
The executives surveyed by the Adecco Group collectively oversee 8.6 million workers. Those workers are witnessing a transformation in how their jobs are structured, what tools are making decisions around them, and what their roles will look like in 12 months. However, most of them are not even part of the conversation.
