Image the scene. You’re at your desk, deadline looming, and also you determine to let AI deal with the primary draft. You sort a immediate. The result’s fallacious. You attempt once more. Nonetheless not proper. Ten minutes later you’re no nearer, and the clock is ticking. Finally you shut Copilot and do it the previous approach, the way in which that takes longer, however at the very least it really works.
If that sounds acquainted, you’re not alone. And in keeping with Forrester VP and Principal Analyst JP Gownder, it’s turning into one of many fundamental productiveness issues within the trendy office.
“I would like you to place your self into the place, I do know I’ve personally, of: I attempt a immediate and it fails. I attempt one other immediate and it fails,” he advised UC Right now. “At that second, I’ve a call to make. Both I can maintain messing round with Copilot with no precise assure that I’m going to get it to do what I would like, or I may give up and do it the previous approach. What we’re seeing is numerous abandonment behaviour, as a result of persons are both losing time and by no means getting a solution, or just abandoning the software. And after they abandon the software, they fall off the educational curve fully.”
Watch the total interview: Why AI Literacy Is Hurting Productiveness: Forrester’s JP Gownder
The numbers behind the issue
Gownder’s feedback come alongside Forrester’s second AIQ report. AIQ stands for Synthetic Intelligence Quotient, a measure of worker readiness to succeed with AI instruments at work. The findings make uncomfortable studying for any organisation that has invested closely in enterprise AI.
Regardless of greater than 80% of corporations having deployed at the very least some AI instruments, simply 16% of workers throughout the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia achieved a excessive AIQ rating in 2025, up from 12% in 2024. Gownder is evident that the tempo of progress is nowhere close to matching the tempo of deployment.
Solely 51% of organisations prepare non-technical workers on generative AI in any respect. Simply 23% educate immediate engineering. And solely 37% of workers really feel assured adapting to AI-driven methods of working, a determine that has barely shifted 12 months on 12 months. As UC Right now has beforehand reported, practically half of all AI licences go unused, costing giant enterprises a mean of $80.6 million yearly — and the AIQ information helps clarify why.
“For many workers, the price to that particular person of utilizing a software like Copilot or Gemini is usually greater than the time financial savings they obtain on the opposite finish,” Gownder explains. “As a result of they’re studying by doing, and that studying is sluggish, painful, and taking place with out practically sufficient assist.”
A brand new downside: AI slop
Past the abandonment cycle, Gownder identifies a second productiveness drain rising in workplaces. He calls it AI slop.
“Work slop, AI slop that individuals ship round at work is turning into a giant downside,” he says. “Individuals don’t need to learn it, so that they don’t learn it. It’s all these individuals producing all this content material that’s filling individuals’s inboxes after which they don’t learn it. That’s detrimental productiveness proper there.”
The image is one among know-how creating new inefficiencies as quick because it guarantees to take away previous ones, not as a result of the instruments are dangerous, however as a result of the individuals utilizing them haven’t been given what they should use them properly.
The accountability hole
That is the place organisations are basically getting it fallacious. There’s a widespread assumption in enterprise AI rollout that the instruments will largely converse for themselves, that workers will discover, experiment, and naturally enhance. Forrester’s analysis suggests in any other case, and the results are falling on the workforce.
“Workers are usually not chargeable for buying these expertise on their very own,” Gownder says. “You because the employer are chargeable for cultivating a studying and engagement surroundings that may equip them with the talents, understanding and ethics they should succeed. That is your accountability as a pacesetter. It isn’t one thing you simply push all the way down to the staff and say, good luck.”
The answer, he argues, is just not extra on-line coaching modules. Organisations must rethink how they assist AI adoption, constructing steady, hands-on, peer-based studying that places the worker quite than the know-how on the centre. Forrester’s analysis discovered that social studying is at the very least twice as efficient as formal coaching in relation to elevating AIQ in apply.
“This looks as if a really techno-focused train,” he says. “It’s a human-focused train. We have to make investments extra in individuals as we roll out AI, not much less.”
For the organisations nonetheless ready to see a return on their AI funding, which may be an important line in the entire report.
