Here’s a question worth asking yourself before you ask your team: if they were surveyed anonymously tomorrow, would they say they trust you to keep people first as AI comes into the business?
Employment Hero asked New Zealand workers something close to that. 52% said they trust their employer to prioritise staff retention as AI is integrated.
That’s about half. The other half either don’t trust it, or aren’t sure yet.
They can see the upside
What makes that number interesting is what sits next to it.
57% of employees in the same research said AI is helping them develop more valuable skills. These aren’t people who think AI is useless or a fad. Plenty of them have felt it help in their own work.
But 36% believe AI makes them more vulnerable to layoffs. And Employment Hero’s earlier release on the same research found 42% of Kiwi workers believe heavy AI use shows they’re no longer needed.
So the picture isn’t resistance. It’s people who can see what AI does for their work, and aren’t sure what their employer will do with that.
Trust about AI is built after the announcement
Most leaders I talk to have no plan to use AI to cut people. Some have said so to their team, which matters. But a statement is the start of it, not the end.
People watch what happens next. Specifically, they watch what happens to the time.
When a task that used to take a day now takes an hour, the hour goes somewhere. It might go into more of the same work, quietly. It might go into the thing the team has wanted to get to for years and never had room for. Or it might become a conversation about whether the role is still needed.
Your team will notice which of those it is. They’ll talk about it with each other, and that conversation will do more to shape what they believe than anything in an all-staff email.
What earns the other half
None of this needs a programme or a budget. It needs a few decisions made deliberately, rather than left to happen:
- Decide what freed-up time is for, before it’s freed. Better service, the backlog, the project that keeps getting pushed back, someone going home on time. Pick it, and say it.
- Let the first gains go to the person who made them. If someone’s AI-assisted shortcut saves them three hours a week, the first thing they should feel is relief, not a heavier load. That’s what makes the next person willing to try.
- Be honest when you don’t know. If a role is genuinely changing, say so early and talk about what it’s changing into. People handle honest uncertainty far better than finding out late.
- Do it the same way for everyone. Trust erodes fastest when people see one team’s freed-up time treated differently from another’s.
The caveats
This is vendor research: Employment Hero sells HR and payroll software. The 52% and 36% come from its September release, which doesn’t restate which sample they come from, so I’ve noted that under the piece. The New Zealand base in the full report is 256 leaders and 820 employees, which is a reasonable sample, but it’s a survey of how people feel, not a record of what employers did.
Declaring an interest
Helping businesses bring AI in so their people feel accompanied rather than replaced is what we do at Coreshift. Weigh my conclusion with that in mind.
But the decision about where the freed-up hour goes isn’t one any outside adviser can make for you. It’s yours, and your team is already watching to see what you decide.