Artificial intelligence in business: Italia is lagging behind – only 12 per cent of managers say they are ready

Against this already tense backdrop, the situation in Italy is the most critical of the entire sample. Only 24 per cent of leaders say they have a strategy for clearly communicating the opportunities associated with AI to employees, compared with 36 per cent globally; only 29 per cent believe that their staff understand how their work contributes to the company’s success, compared with 44 per cent in the rest of the sample. The lowest figure of all – not just for Italia, but across all thirteen countries analysed – relates to confidence in their process for developing adaptability and continuous learning skills: just 12 per cent of Italian executives say they are very confident in this regard.

The difference in perspective regarding the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence is also striking. For Italian leaders, the priority remains defensive: automating routine HR tasks to improve efficiency (24 per cent of responses). Globally, however, the prevailing view is the opposite: AI is seen primarily as a tool to enable employees to manage their own development and learning independently (36 per cent).

The figure that overturns the most common narrative – that of workers resistant to change – comes from the group’s own ‘Workforce Trends Report’: 79 per cent of Italian workers say they are willing to adapt to the impact of artificial intelligence. Globally, 70 per cent of workers already feel ready to collaborate with intelligent agents, but only 39 per cent of leaders believe their employees would actually be comfortable doing so. In short, the gap does not lie between people and technology, but between the speed with which senior management intend to adopt AI and the clarity with which they manage to communicate its value to those who work alongside them every day.

The study also identifies a group of organisations that appear to have found the right formula: those that invest in technology whilst simultaneously putting people at the centre, with systematic measurement of internal trust. Within this sub-group, 76 per cent report having a highly adaptable workforce, compared with 42 per cent of other companies; 49 per cent adopt a mature approach to measuring trust, compared with 18 per cent. But even this positive sign must be put into perspective: the proportion of companies falling into this ‘elite’ category has fallen by four percentage points over the past year, a sign that the transition from declared enthusiasm to execution on a large scale remains, across the board, the real bottleneck.

“When an organisation pushes for the adoption of artificial intelligence without keeping its employees on board, it isn’t really accelerating: it’s adding complexity without control,” commented Angelo Lo Vecchio, Country President of The Adecco Group Italy, citing Italia’s 12 per cent figure as “the lowest among all the countries analysed”. For Lo Vecchio, this is not a matter of resistance to change, but of “a lack of clarity and strategic courage”: AI governance within a company, according to the manager, should measure internal trust with the same rigour applied to financial results.