Ninety-eight per cent of HR teams globally now use artificial intelligence, but the technology remains stuck on minor task completion rather than work that changes how the function operates, according to Culture Amp's second annual AI in HR survey. The research, based on responses from HR professionals worldwide, found 52 per cent remain unfavourable toward agentic AI - systems that can autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks - exposing what the report's authors call a confidence gap rather than a technology gap.
The finding lands as Gartner and other analysts track a similar pattern across markets, with HR leaders caught between rapid AI adoption and hesitation about handing over consequential decisions. For HR teams expected to lead AI transformation inside their organisations, that internal divide has become a strategic problem.
A gap between access and trust
Culture Amp's data shows the barrier to advanced AI use in HR isn't a lack of tools or training. HR executives are more likely than any other group in the function to use AI for genuinely agentic tasks, while more junior practitioners lag well behind. The report's authors say that split likely mirrors a broader pattern across organisations, where those closest to setting strategy have built more confidence in advanced AI capability than the rest of the workforce.
That gap matters because analysts including Gartner and the World Economic Forum increasingly expect HR to lead AI transformation inside organisations - redesigning how work gets done, building new capability and guiding the rest of the business through the shift. If the function expected to lead that transformation has a meaningful internal divide between its most senior and most junior practitioners, it signals how difficult closing the gap will be more broadly.
Justin Angsuwat, chief people and customer engagement officer at Culture Amp, said the findings point to something bigger than HR alone.
"It's our job as leaders to model agentic usage and show them what it can look like. We have to take them along for the ride," he said. "For organisations to move from tinkering to transformation, they'll need to actively build psychological safety and governance frameworks around autonomous AI use, not just deploy more tools meant to assist with one-off task completion."
Trust depends on transparency
The survey also found that 89% of HR professionals are more likely to act on AI outputs that cite their sources. Culture Amp says that reinforces that closing the confidence gap isn't only about exposure to the technology, but about designing systems people can see the workings of and building the right governance framework around them.
Angsuwat said Culture Amp has approached its own AI rollout in stages rather than setting productivity targets from the outset. "We set aside six weeks to drive confidence in AI, and we did that. So, 84% of our organisation became confident using AI, and in fact only 4% had negative sentiment around that," he said.
Rather than pushing for immediate output gains, the company deliberately avoided "kind of systemic work shift as a result of that" in the early phase, giving staff room to experiment before expecting behavioural change. He linked that caution to a wider concern about how AI reshapes trust at work, noting that senior staff often built their careers on skills that AI is now starting to automate. "People who are successful today were successful in the old way of doing things," he said, "and we need people to let go of that part of their identity to shift to a new way of doing things."
Governance first, enthusiasm second
Angsuwat was clear that governance, not enthusiasm, has to carry the weight of managing that risk. Culture Amp runs a cross-functional AI governance committee spanning legal, risk, security, finance and engineering, but he said the goal isn't to default to the most cautious option on every issue.
"There's some things that we're more willing to experiment on and other things where we have bright lines," he said. "Making employment decisions is a hard line that I won't cross."
For HR leaders navigating the same tension between speed and caution, Angsuwat's message is that the surge in agentic AI adoption doesn't have to come at the cost of workforce trust - provided governance and transparency are built in from the start, rather than bolted on after the fact. That means setting clear boundaries on what AI can decide, making AI outputs auditable, and giving teams room to build confidence before expecting behavioural change.
HR professionals looking to close the confidence gap within their own teams can start with structured training that addresses both the technical and governance sides of agentic AI. Resources like the AI Learning Path for CHROs and broader AI for Human Resources courses offer practical frameworks for building that capability across seniority levels.
Why this matters for HR professionals
The survey's core finding - that senior HR leaders trust agentic AI far more than their teams do - directly affects HR practitioners at every level. For junior and mid-level HR staff, the takeaway is that the gap isn't about capability; it's about exposure and confidence. For senior leaders, the takeaway is that deploying more tools won't close the gap on its own - building governance, transparency and staged learning will. The leaders who bridge that divide within their own function first will be the ones best positioned to guide their organisations through the wider shift.
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