• Regardless of function, role or level, every
employee must be capable of assessing how and where AI adds the most value to
their job, take steps to integrate the right technology into the right
processes and build complementary human skills.
• The concern that AI and automation will result in
mass human layoffs remains largely unfounded.
• The workers who can meet employers where
they are and then suggest techniques to take AI usage to the next level
will be the most marketable and valuable to today’s organizations.
• Approximately one-third of employers in
ManpowerGroup’s 2025 Employment Outlook Survey said that AI cannot replace or
augment human skills such as ethical judgment or personalized customer service. In
areas where employers feel AI can make tangible contributions now, human skills
gaps exist.
• Employers who want to actively boost tool usage
and productivity must provide the right AI literacy training. Well-designed
training programmes, integrating real world practice using AI tools can
significantly shorten skill acquisition time.
• Both employers and employees should proactively
redesign roles to maximize human-AI collaboration, with AI tackling
routine and repeatable tasks and employees concentrating on the more nuanced
activities at which humans excel. Every AI implementation should benefit from
human oversight and translation.
PUTTING AI TO WORK
It’s not an easy time to be an employee in today’s
business world. Not only are we coping with unprecedented levels of
geopolitical instability, but the arrival of generative and agentic AI is
transforming our jobs in real time. If we wish to be gainfully employed for the
foreseeable future, we must understand how to leverage the opportunity of AI to
work as an effective partner alongside smart machines.
While organizations are trying to do their part in providing
us with the right skills and training, the individual has an important degree
of responsibility as well. Regardless of function, role or level, every
employee must be capable of assessing how and where AI adds the most value to
their job, take steps to integrate the right technology into the right
processes and build complementary human skills like judgement and discernment,
ethical oversight, interpersonal engagement and creative problem-solving.
In this paper, we will share what our latest ManpowerGroup
Employment Outlook Survey and Experis CIO Outlook research tells us about how
employers are using AI and what they expect from their employees. We will then
provide specific guidance for how the individual can futureproof their careers
in the age of generative and agentic AI and even overdeliver on their
leadership’s AI-related goals.
AI adoption progress: Individuals and organizations
While there has been substantial hype around the use of AI
in the workplace, it’s critical for employees to understand the reality. The
workers who can meet employers where they are and then suggest techniques to
take AI usage to the next level will be the most marketable and valuable to
today’s organizations.
The talent acquisition function has some of the most
mature implementations of AI-based technologies. Our research
indicates that nearly half of UK employers (45%) are currently leveraging AI
tools in hiring and onboarding talent. When it comes to other countries, South
and Central American companies outpace the rest of the world in early AI adoption
for hiring, training and onboarding.
UK employer acceptance of AI use by candidates
Learning more about a company 35%
Interview Preparation 33%
Searching for Jobs 32%
Cover Letter / CV Preparation 25%
Answering Interview Questions 19%
Enhancing portfolios 18%
Hiring test problem-solving 17%
Unacceptable during hiring process 20%
80% of UK employers think it's acceptable for candidates
to use AI during their job search process
79%of UK CIOs and senior tech leaders are still exploring
and scaling capabilities, offering valuable time for workers to refine their
own skills.
Most employers (80%) think it’s also acceptable for
candidates to use AI during the hiring process. Specific examples our employer
respondents cited included searching for information generally (62%), learning
about a company (35%) and preparing for interviews (33%). Organizations in the
energy and technology sectors are more open to candidates using AI.
It’s worth considering an employer’s level of technology
sophistication when applying, as our research also found that employers which
have rejected or not considered AI adoption in hiring are less open to
candidates using AI themselves.
In the UK, AI adoption challenges within the workplace and
in other organizational operations have barely changed since 2024, with high
investment cost still being the top barrier (41%). As enthusiastic as they are
about the prospect of AI, employers are realistic about its current
capabilities.
The Experis 2025 CIO Outlook research illustrated that
tech leaders are aware of AI’s limitations: 35% of UK respondents said AI is a
game changer that requires more refinement, while 30% said the impact of these
technologies on the business is still unclear. However, the good news
for candidates is that it is not too late. Only 11% of UK CIOs and senior tech
leaders say AI is fully integrated across their organization.
At the same time, approximately one-third of human skills,
such as team management or personalized customer service, cannot be replaced by
AI. In areas where employers feel AI can make tangible contributions now, human
skills gaps exist. For instance, 33% of companies in the Asia Pacific region
named workers’ lack of AI skills as the greatest adoption barrier.
Employers identify skills that AI can’t replace
Team Management 34%
Customer Service 34%
Communication 33%
Ethical Judgement 31%
Teaching and Training 27%
Strategic Thinking 25%
Sales Skills 25%
Technical Expertise 24%
Problem Solving 24%
Project Management 21%
Ideation and Creativity 20%
Employees in the UK are a bit more certain of some skills.
ManpowerGroup’s 2025 Talent Barometer research2 found that 92% of UK employees
have moderate to high confidence in their ability to perform their jobs, and
81% believe they have the right technology and tools to do their jobs
effectively.
However, there are some growing worker concerns about AI
skills gaps. According to new SAP Success Factors research, for
instance, employees with low AI literacy levels expressed far more negative
views towards AI in the workplace. These respondents were six times more likely
to feel apprehensive and seven times more likely to feel afraid of using AI at
work. They were also eight times more likely to feel distressed about
using AI when compared to more AI-savvy employees surveyed.
Perhaps because this skill set is still relatively uncommon,
the SAP research uncovered that managers look more favorably upon employees who
demonstrate AI literacy. For example, when asked whether AI should influence
performance reviews, many managers believed that employees who use AI should
receive better performance reviews than non-users.
Meanwhile, the concern that AI and automation will result in
mass human layoffs remains largely unfounded. Our recent global employment
outlook surveys still show net positive hiring demand across the majority of
industries. These findings present a major opportunity for employees to
reconfigure their own roles to work more efficiently with AI, which leads us to
the next section on how to proceed with your own AI-related education and
experimentation.
Most employees are NOT concerned about falling behind:
92%...have moderate to high confidence in their ability to
perform their jobs
81%...believe they have the right technology and tools to do
their jobs well
Best practices for employees and employers
How employees can take charge of AI upskilling
All employees working today must be on a path to role
redesign, which involves examining how the right AI skills can help them meet
and even exceed a job’s current expectations and developing adjacent human
skills that are unlikely to be automated or programmed away – at least in the
near term. Fortunately, there are a variety of strategies for adding AI skills
to your personal arsenal.
Understand the need for career durability
According to ManpowerGroup futurist, Alexandra Levit, career
durability refers to the ability to remain gainfully employed despite external
disruptions, including technological advancements. Career durability
has five pillars: hard skills, soft skills, institutional knowledge, applied
technology skills and a growth mindset. The acquisition of AI
proficiency is an example of an applied technology skill. You don’t necessarily
have to know exactly how algorithms work, but you DO have to know that you can
use available AI-based technologies to do your job more effectively.
Learn the types of AI being used in your workplace
As the title suggests, generative AI programmes such as
ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot focus on creating new content based on previous,
human-developed assets with similar patterns and characteristics. A newer
offshoot of generative AI is agentic AI, which goes a step further to empower
an AI-based system to act autonomously and make decisions in collaboration with
other AI-based systems. To find out what your organization is deploying
and how, get to know your IT representatives and ask for a chat or a
brainstorm. If your IT or innovation group is building a home-grown AI
application, perhaps ask if your group can help to test it.
Research AI use cases for your role
Depending on your function, other organizations may
already be using AI to improve business outcomes. For example, in the
human resources function, an AI-based technology called talent intelligence
relies on deep learning and advanced analytics to gain visibility into the
skills of a company’s workforce and the hiring and training required to keep pace
with industry developments. You might hear about relevant implementations at
conferences and in conversations with your peers, or simply by reading articles
or searching online.
Sign up for relevant training
Most organizations are at the point of hosting at least
informal training on AI literacy. But whether your company is doing this or
not, you can take advantage of free online offerings from Google,
Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and DeepLearning. AI – among many
others. You’ll have the opportunity to master cutting edge skills like prompt
engineering and working with and training large language models (LLM). Most
intro-level courses are written for a general audience using consumer-friendly
language and examples, so don’t despair if you lack a technology foundation.
Gain buy-in for a small pilot
Once you understand the AI-based implementations that are
possible for your role or group, and you’ve at least drafted a path to
execution for one of them, it’s time to take the idea to your manager. In
presenting the idea, be as clear and detailed as you can regarding business
justification, resource allocation and projected benefits. Your goal
should be a “fail fast” scenario in which a limited scale pilot can be tweaked
or redirected in real time.
Measure and promote your results
Before you begin your pilot, your team should gain
consensus on what success looks like. If the goal is for your AI-based
implementation to grow beyond a pilot, then you must know, right out of the
gate, how you’ll achieve a return on investment (ROI) for the business.
Examples of the ROI on effective AI implementations include revenue growth,
cost reduction and customer satisfaction. So, you’ll want to track these
against the pre-AI status quo for the duration of your project, and then get
your communications colleagues involved in showcasing stellar results via
relevant internal and external channels.
Don’t forget to build your human skills
As we’ve discussed, this is a period in which every worker
must look at their role with a critical eye, assess the job responsibilities
most vulnerable to being usurped by AI, and make a plan for ongoing human value
creation. Competitive skills, such as creativity and problem-solving,
give humans unique advantages over AI. Cooperative skills, like
ethical oversight and clear communication, improve collaboration between humans
and AI.
AI upskilling
Experis Academy has collaborated with Microsoft since
2017 to identify skills gaps in the market. It aims to introduce new
professionals to the tech industry through various skilling programmes. The
Microsoft partnership aims to fuel organizations with skilled professionals to
enable growth. Experis Academy offers tech talent training programmes that
provide practical experience in in-demand tech stacks such as Azure and Copilot
Studio. Through our partnership with Microsoft and other global tech
leaders, we deliver comprehensive programmes covering the full range of AI
platforms. These programmes include training for roles such as cloud
engineers, developers, data analysts, data scientists, functional and technical
consultants and more. All training is based on best-in-class tech platforms and
most offer independent industry-recognized certification for participating
candidates.
Key considerations for employers
If you’re an employer determining the best way to
integrate AI-based technologies into your operations and want to support your
employees in developing the right skills to assist, here are a few guidelines
to consider.
Consider augmentation over automation. AI tends
to augment human work more often than it fully automates it. A recent Anthropic
study showed that many cognitively oriented tasks turn out to be substantially
more complex than they initially appear, requiring broader contextualization
that AI has not fully mastered. This complexity preserves significant portions
of most jobs. Even advanced AI has blind spots related to common sense
reasoning, domain specific knowledge and dynamic problem-solving in uncertain
environments. These limitations reinforce the idea that humans remain
indispensable in roles requiring subtle judgment or emotional interaction.
Develop and test models with a trusted
partner. If you already have HR technology systems in place, chances
are they are at least experimenting – if not actively selling – AI components
to their solution. So, instead of starting from scratch, talk to your existing
vendors about how you can leverage AI to optimize your workforce operations.
Try one functional area at a time and be willing to see new implementations as
works in progress that require continuous testing and refinement.
Put ongoing upskilling initiatives in place. The
routine use of AI-based technologies is creating tremendous demand for the
requisite skills allowing human workers to design, manage, collaborate with,
fix, redeploy and explain the inner workings of AI components. However, most
employees today don’t have these skills yet, and employers who want to actively
boost tool usage and productivity must provide the right AI literacy training
themselves. Well-designed training programmes integrating real-world practice
using AI tools can significantly shorten skill acquisition time.
Always incorporate human oversight into AI-driven
processes. As Leaming and Anthropic pointed out, while AI may handle data
analysis or initial drafting, humans are always needed to provide context,
ethical judgment and emotional intelligence. Most organizations especially
require human translators, who can immediately align AI capabilities with
business goals. Many, if not a majority of roles, should be redesigned to
maximize human-AI collaboration, with AI tackling routine and repeatable tasks
and employees concentrating on the more nuanced activities at which humans
excel.
Master internal integration before external
commercialization. Naturally, most leaders are excited by the prospect of
integrating AI into their products and services. However, it’s wise to walk
before you run and take the time to deploy AI internally first. Once a few AI
implementations have increased operational efficiency enterprise-wide, you’ll
be in a better position to engender trust with customers and other stakeholders
and will be less likely to make mistakes that could result in reputational
fallout. Whether we’re incorporating AI-based technologies into an everyday
task or a complex enterprise process, flexibility, curiosity and a positive
attitude are essential. As long as humans remain the true masters of our own
knowledge domains and strive to keep our skill sets current and applicable, we
have little to fear. For those who take the right steps to prepare and pivot,
building and sustaining a meaningful career in the age of AI is not only
doable, but exciting and full of opportunity.
“For a growing number of our clients, Sophie™ is a game
changer. Combining the strengths of multiple large language models with the
power of our proprietary workforce data are critical to help them navigate this
period of rapid change.” – Max Leaming, Head of Data Science and AI Solutions,
ManpowerGroup
Sophie: Leveraging AI to improve strategic workforce
planning
Sophie AI is our ever-evolving, constantly upgrading AI
ecosystem – and your ally in reshaping the workforce. Sophie AI
technology enhances and accelerates all our products, services and solutions,
so our people can deliver faster, better and smarter for you.
Sophie AI also empowers you with next-gen tools across the
workforce lifecycle. Built with industry-leading data and the
world-class labor market expertise of ManpowerGroup, Sophie AI gives you the
power, tools and insights to deliver immediate value and outpace the
competition.
Leveraging insights from more than 22 billion data points
with the power of our global team of workforce experts, the Sophie AI platform
helps a growing number of clients in diverse industries (e.g. tech, defence and
professional services) improve their strategic workforce planning process.
Experis: Your trusted technology and talent partner
Experis is a global leader in technology services and talent
resourcing, recognized for its commitment to quality, ethics and service
excellence. With a presence in over 70 countries, we proudly partner
with 80% of the Fortune 500 companies to deliver value through
strategic projects, managed teams and flexible staff augmentation. We
specialize in various domains, including architecture design, application
development, cloud migration, data integration, AI modelling, ITSM automation
and digital transformation, among others.
Accelerated time-to-value
Achieve faster results and tangible outcomes with agile and
continuous delivery, proven accelerators, domain knowledge and experienced
leadership.
Strong, flexible partnerships
No matter where you are in your initiatives, Experis brings
strategy, technical expertise, support services and talent to align with your
unique goals.
High quality, optimized cost
We believe in doing things right the first time. Our teams
are equipped to assess your needs and recommend the right model to optimize
costs and maximize quality – whether onshore or hybrid / multi-shore.
Specialized, engaged people
Our deep expertise in key industries, technologies and skill
sets complement your team to accelerate results. Our consultant experience
contributes to our impact and retention.
Our proven expertise and long-standing customer
relationships set us apart in today's complex economy. With decades of
experience and deep industry insight, we understand the technologies shaping
your future.
