Nearly 70% of Workers Use AI Regularly, But Many Lack Time to Upskill

What happened

A new report from Workera, first covered in an exclusive by ZDNET, finds that nearly 70% of workers now use AI regularly, yet many say they are not given the time to upskill. The research also points to a mismatch between businesses and employees over how AI upskilling should work.

The central tension is between usage and development. Adoption is spreading across workforces faster than the learning that should accompany it, and the findings suggest organisations and their people do not yet share a common picture of what that learning requires.

Why it matters

For leaders in experience and digital transformation, this moves AI skills from a training-catalogue question into an operating-model question. When staff are already using AI in daily work but lack protected time to build their capability, that capability develops informally and unevenly. That makes output quality, consistency and governance harder to manage, particularly in customer-facing roles.

It also bears directly on employee experience. If leadership and staff define upskilling differently, programmes can be funded and launched yet still feel irrelevant to the people they are meant to serve. Service design should treat learning time as part of the workflow rather than an addition on top of it.

The Renascence take

Most coverage will fixate on the 70% usage figure. The more useful signal is the gap between using AI and being supported to get better at it, because usage is a behaviour that happens on its own, while upskilling is a decision about where time and attention are deliberately allocated.

Treat "we have AI tools" as a sign of progress only once employees have time carved out of their schedules to learn them. Ask staff what they think upskilling means before writing the programme, because a mismatch in definitions quietly guarantees low take-up. Budget learning hours the same way you budget the systems people rely on, or expect your AI rollout to deliver speed in the short term and inconsistency in the long term.