By Toby Longhurst
How can organisations improve employee AI adoption in the workplace? Managers play a central role by creating the confidence, time, and support teams need to use AI in everyday work. This article explores how NEON helps leaders and employees build AI readiness together across a global workforce.
Why AI Use Often Stalls
Most leaders assume the barrier to AI adoption is whether employees are ready for it. McKinsey’s Superagency in the Workplace research found the opposite is closer to true. C-suite leaders in the study were more than twice as likely to point to employee readiness as the barrier to adoption than to look at their own role, even though employees reported being considerably more ready than their leaders assumed. Leaders estimated that only four percent of employees were using generative AI for at least a third of their daily work. The real figure, self-reported by employees, was three times higher. At Cloudstaff, NEON, our team building program running across four countries this year, is one of the ways we are working to close that gap.
I lead Cloudstaff Experience for a global workforce spread across the Philippines, Colombia, India, and Sri Lanka. Over the past year I have sat with teams in a dozen cities around the world having some version of the same conversation, and the pattern holds. Employees are often not the ones dragging their feet on AI. The real question is whether the people leading them are actively engaged enough to notice, and to help.
What Employees Say Would Help Drive AI Adoption
That is where the real bottleneck sits. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that manager support is one of the strongest predictors of whether AI adoption actually changes how work gets done, ahead of the technical integration itself. Yet fewer than one in three employees at AI adopting organisations strongly agree their manager actively supports their use of AI. Employees are already experimenting on their own. What is missing, for most of them, is someone in the room actively backing that experimentation.
Employees have been fairly clear about what would help close that gap. In McKinsey’s survey, formal training from their own organisation was the factor employees rated most likely to increase their AI use, ahead of better tools, incentives, or anything else on the list. That finding matches what we see firsthand. The teams who use AI well tend to share one thing: managers who made room for questions, false starts, and honest conversation about what AI tools are actually for.
How NEON Brings Managers and Teams Together
Here is what that looks like in practice. It is easy to describe NEON as a series of offsites: a resort, team games, a raffle. The bigger purpose sits underneath that. It gives thousands of Cloudstaffers, from Bogotá to Bacolod, a genuine, in person space where leaders and teams talk through what AI actually means for their roles together, in a room with people they already trust. In Naga and Legazpi, that meant an open conversation about where AI is heading at Cloudstaff, led directly by senior leadership. In India, it meant building confidence to apply AI in real work, alongside cultural performances and team activities that had nothing to do with AI at all. Both belong in the same room. People build confidence in new tools from leaders who are actually in the room with them, which is a critical part of successful ai implementation.
Three Steps to Close the Manager Engagement Gap
This is where I would push back on how most organisations sequence AI adoption. The instinct is to treat the technology as the hard part, roll it out, and assume managers will naturally champion it once it is live. The data suggests managers need the same deliberate investment as the tool itself. A manager who has been given the confidence and the airtime to talk about AI with their team becomes an advocate. A manager left to figure it out alone usually does not.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 expects thirty nine percent of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. The businesses managing that shift well treat leadership engagement as a people investment, built into the plan from day one alongside the technology itself.
For any leader trying to close this gap in their own team, three things have helped us make real progress:
- Give managers real airtime to model and talk about AI use with their teams.
- Ask managers directly whether they feel equipped to support their team’s AI use. A companywide rollout rarely covers that on its own.
- Treat manager engagement with AI as an ongoing rhythm you revisit throughout the year.
Questions to Ask When Choosing a Virtual Staffing Partner
Businesses evaluating a virtual staffing partner right now would do well to ask a different question than the one usually asked. The real question worth asking is whether the managers leading that workforce actively back AI use in daily practice. The perception gap McKinsey and Gallup both found is the same gap that decides whether an AI investment actually changes how work gets done, or just sits in the background looking good in a slide deck.
FAQ
How can managers improve AI adoption in their teams?
Give managers time to model AI use, provide targeted training, and create repeated opportunities for discussion and practice with their teams. They also give employees an opportunity to ask questions about AI tools, understand how those tools apply to their roles, and build confidence in integrating AI into their work.
What role do training and in-person sessions play in AI adoption?
Formal, contextual training and in-person discussions help teams turn early experimentation into shared, everyday practice.
How do you measure manager support for AI?
Pulse surveys asking whether managers actively encourage and model AI use, team AI usage rates, and outcomes tied to AI driven tasks all give a useful read on manager support. Employee feedback can also help organisations understand whether employee engagement is translating into greater confidence and practical AI use.
About the Author
Toby Longhurst is the Director of CSX (Cloudstaff Experience) at Cloudstaff, where he is dedicated to crafting engaging experiences for the global workforce. With a background in journalism and editing, and extensive experience in communications management, Toby has played a central role in connecting Australian, New Zealand, and US businesses with dedicated teams in the Philippines. Prior to his current role, he served as General Manager at Vertical Internet Media DeskStaff.pro, and worked as an editor and journalist at QNews Magazine. He is a graduate of The University of Queensland and is passionate about building positive workplace culture and strengthening cross-border business relationships.