Redesigning Work: AI’s Performance Review

65% of workers are feeling confident and enthusiastic about using AI at work, with most (58%) saying they’re motivated by time savings.

But the usage numbers tell a different story: On average, employees are spending more of their AI time on troubleshooting and prompt iteration (42%) than on productive work (35%).

Most organizations (63%) have increased their AI tool budgets in response to employee usage—but is the investment worth it?

To find out how AI is really impacting the workplace, BambooHR surveyed over 1,600 full-time, salaried workers across the US, representing over a dozen industries and including a subset of HR pros to find insights directly from operations teams.

It’s time for AI’s performance review.

Workers on average spend around an hour and a half talking to and using AI each day (87 minutes)—that’s 22,526 minutes each calendar work year, or roughly 47 eight-hour workdays.

But all those hours aren’t necessarily going toward productivity. On average, workers spend more of their AI time troubleshooting errors and on prompt iteration (42% of AI time) than actively furthering their workload (35% of AI time).

Workers on average are spending over half an hour each day (36 minutes) troubleshooting AI errors and on prompt iteration—that’s 9,461 minutes each year, or roughly 20 full workdays spent on just troubleshooting AI.

As AI takes on more of the day, it’s absorbing conversations that used to happen between people. In a standard eight-hour workday, the employee is working solo for a little over half (56%) of the day on average.

The other portion of an employee’s time is now split between AI and human interactions: 41% is spent with AI and 59% is spent having conversations with people.

The data suggests that AI use could be pulling away from time that would otherwise be spent on collegial collaboration—workers who express hesitancy around AI spend an extra 15 minutes on human interaction a day (over an hour each week) compared to their AI-enthusiast counterparts.

For executives, AI is even more of an attention-grabber. VPs and C-suite executives are spending nearly twice as much time each day with AI compared to individual contributors.

Your new coworker is the talk of the town, but not all that talk is good: 86% of American workers say their mindset on AI usage has been impacted by recent AI news, including coverage on data centers, environmental effects, and job impacts. Notably, 70% of workers say that recent news about AI’s environmental impact and energy consumption has impacted their personal feelings about using AI tools at work.

Despite negative headlines shifting personal sentiment, most workers aren’t changing their AI use. While a third of workers (33%) have hesitations around using AI tools, only 3% have actually refused to use them.

Redesigning work means redesigning how knowledge moves through an organization when AI is the first thing people reach for.

Employees are increasingly turning to AI for guidance instead of humans, with a third of workers (35%) saying knowledge transfer at their organization now runs primarily through AI tools rather than people.

One in five workers (19%) already use AI as their default first call for workplace guidance. This portion goes up for HR and operations questions: 39% of employees ask AI for help with issues that they would previously take to HR or ops.

The avoidance of getting help from a human looks to mostly be a mix of self-sufficiency and self-consciousness: 53% of workers opt to find an answer themselves before asking anyone, while 27% would rather ask AI than admit to needing help.

As AI edges in on human guidance, the dearth of mentorship is being felt. Half of workers (49%) say there’s a meaningful communication gap between junior and senior employees. AI is at least in part to blame: nearly half of employees (48%) say that cross-generational mentorship has become harder as junior workers lean on AI instead of senior colleagues.

The workforce is noticing the impact on early-career workers—two in five employees (42%) say that junior workers at their organization rely on AI in ways that limit their growth and learning.

Moreover, it’s the younger workers themselves who are most likely to say AI is limiting their own growth: 54% of Gen Z and 43% of Millennials say that junior workers at their organization rely on AI in ways that limit their growth and learning, compared to 39% of Gen X and 21% of Baby Boomers.

As AI use becomes the norm, the boundaries between personal and company accounts are becoming blurred, exposing organizations to security risks and misuse of company resources. Employees, meanwhile, aren’t aware of just how much their AI use is being surveilled.

Over half of workers (59%) admit to using personal AI accounts for work tasks. Among the employees who use personal AI for work, 71% have entered client data, proprietary strategy, or other sensitive company information into tools their employer has no visibility into.

Many employees may be underinformed on where the security risk lies, with 45% of workers saying that using personal or non-employer-owned AI tools for work isn’t a big deal.

On the flipside, 62% of employees admit to using company AI tools for personal purposes. Non-work use of company AI tools runs the gamut from drafting emails to asking for personal advice. Most notably, one in six workers (17%) use company-provided AI tools for their own side businesses or freelance work, and more than one in four workers (27%) use company-provided AI tools to help them with their job hunt.

Many workers (44%) are trying to cover their tracks on personal AI use at work by deleting prompts immediately after inputting them. However, half of workers (50%) don’t realize their employer can view the prompts or questions they’ve asked company-provided AI.

Employees might not know it, but HR is watching: 89% of HR pros actively review their employees’ AI prompt histories.

63% of HR pros who’ve reviewed employee AI prompt history found workers using company-paid tools to job search, run side businesses, or pursue other income. Additionally, nearly half of HR pros (49%) report finding employee prompts for general personal tasks unrelated to work.

Underneath all the misuse of personal and company AI tools is a policy vacuum—over half of organizations (54%) don’t have a clear, documented AI usage policy that’s consistently communicated across their organizations, leaving data governance largely to chance.

75% of workers say AI has reshaped their work and meaningfully changed how they actually do their jobs—but their on-paper job descriptions haven’t caught up. HR pros are aware of the disparity, saying that the majority of jobs (61%) within the average organization need updated job descriptions to reflect AI’s impact.

But HR is struggling to close the gap between paperwork and reality: On average, HR pros admit they’ve updated less than half (43%) of their workforce’s job descriptions to match new AI expectations. Employees are noticing the slow pace, with more than 1 in 5 workers (21%) having asked for an updated job description and not yet received one. An additional 13% of workers say they plan to advocate for an update soon.

HR says that the job updates are coming: 77% of HR pros plan to update employees’ job descriptions to reflect current AI expectations within the next 12 months.

According to HR pros, the current delays in updating role descriptions are less about resistance and more about moving targets, competing priorities, and compensation anxiety.

While current employees wait for their job descriptions to be updated, new roles are being built with AI expectations already baked in. 70% of HR pros include AI requirements in all newly created roles, regardless of whether the job descriptions for matching internal roles have been updated.

The difference in job descriptions created a two-tiered workforce: New hires have a clear understanding of how their roles are integrated with AI, while tenured employees are left in documentation limbo.

HR is embracing AI, but employees seem less ready. 76% of HR pros consider themselves confident, everyday AI users, compared to just 50% of employees. Moreover, 92% of HR pros are either actively piloting or planning AI agents across the HR lifecycle, from screening candidates to monitoring flight risk and enforcing policies.

As HR takes the lead on AI implementation, they’re also the ones catching the problems. 80% of HR pros admit to finding biases or problems in the LLMs supporting their work—namely AI model bias and demographic bias. 36% of HR pros say they’ve observed AI favoring resumes and cover letters that were drafted by the same model, and 1 in 3 HR pros (33%) noticed AI having a pattern of demographic bias.

That said, 67% of HR pros still say they would trust an AI candidate to interview a potential hire, compared to just 34% of employees.

78% of HR say that AI has actively changed how they evaluate candidates, putting a focus on new competencies needed in an AI-enabled workplace.

Early-career hires appear to be especially struggling to keep up with the competency needs of an AI world—74% of HR pros say they’re actively concerned with the talent pool they are seeing right out of college. Young workers are AI-savvy, but have challenges with interpersonal skills and overrelay on AI for what should be simple tasks.

BambooHR conducted this research using an online survey prepared by Method Research and distributed by RepData among n=1,608 adults (age 18+) in the United States who are full-time salaried employees who currently work in a desk job position, including a subgroup of n=520 HR professionals who have a manager title or above. The sample was equally split between gender, with a spread of age groups, race groups and geographies represented. Data was collected from June 26 to July 15, 2026.

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