South African workers are eager to upskill in AI, yet a significant gap exists between executive ambitions and HR strategies. This article explores the implications of this disconnect and offers insights on bridging the gap for a more effective workforce strategy.
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South African workers are prepared to forfeit a salary increase if it means they could upskill in AI. Their employers are not ready to make that happen.
Mercer’s 11th Global Talent Trends report, based on a survey of nearly 12,000 workplace respondents worldwide, found 71% of South African C-suite leaders have placed AI at the top of their return-on-investment agenda this year, while only 41% of HR teams are prioritising the work redesign to make it happen. That 30-percentage point gap between what the C-suite wants from AI and what HR is working on, is almost double the global disconnect between the executive and the people function on this issue.
When the people team is not in the room for these decisions, executives set the AI agenda and HR inherits the consequences.
The more striking finding is what employees are willing to do. About 65% of South African workers say they would trade a 10% pay increase for meaningful AI and digital skills training – higher than the 63% global average – despite the country’s economic realities and acute cost‑of‑living pressure. A further 83% say they are more productive with access to AI tools, while 78% trust their employer to teach them the skills that they need to do the job. This is not a workforce resisting change; it understands how fast skills are falling behind and wants to stay relevant in the job market.
Yet the data also shows a workforce under pressure. About 53% of South African workers worry their skills will become obsolete, which is in line with the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 projection that 59 in every 100 workers will need reskilling by 2030. Only 41% feel they are thriving at work, against 44% globally. And 74% are wary of AI‑enabled surveillance, which should give any executive pause before rolling out monitoring tools without any open discussion. These are people who want to move with the technology and are not convinced their organisations will make the effort.
Trust is a big factor. Mercer’s research shows that 88% of South African executives believe their organisation places the right amount of trust in employees, but only 68% of employees believe that the people in their organisation actually trust one another. That 20‑point gap shapes how change is read on the ground. When executives introduce AI‑enabled monitoring into a culture where trust is already in short supply, employees are more likely to see it as evidence that trust is missing than as support for better work.
The real execution risk lies in the gap between AI decisions and how they are executed. Boards sign off on budgets and choose platforms; by the time HR is involved, roles, skills and jobs are already on the line. The work itself – who does what, with which tools, and how tasks flow between people and systems – is rarely redesigned with the teams that do it. As a result, pilot programmes fail to launch, employees abandon adoption, and companies never realise the promised productivity gains.
Executives persistently overlook the human impact of AI. Despite clear warning signals from the workforce, few HR teams systematically plan for the psychological and emotional fallout of automation, monitoring, and changing work patterns. Globally, a tiny minority of HR teams factor these impacts into their digital strategies, whereas the vast majority of employees say executives underestimate them. When leadership assumes “trust is fine” and proceeds without safeguards, AI-driven tracking and opaque algorithms are no longer supportive tools, they are corporate surveillance. And the workers – who initially welcomed experimentation – become more hesitant, dragging the entire rollout to a halt.
To bridge this gap between ambition and strategy requires a new approach. First, HR must shape the AI business case from day one. If executives genuinely view AI as a top ROI priority, they must build the people strategy by integrating work design, skills, communication, and safeguards directly into the technology budget. When the C-suite sidelines HR to merely execute boardroom decisions, they inevitably stall promising pilot programmes.
Second, organisations must redesign work before buying tools. Mapping real processes with frontline teams exposes the steps and informal practices that make or break automation. It requires explicit alignment of human and machine contributions across every task, handover, and judgement call. When employees help re-engineer their own workflows, they drive adoption.
Third, leaders must confront surveillance directly by being upfront about how they use AI to track productivity and where they draw the line. Employees expect communication and empathy above all other leadership traits as AI enters the workplace. When executives sneak new monitoring capabilities under the radar, they destroy trust entirely. Management teams introducing AI-based productivity analysis must enforce clear limits, communicate transparently, and guarantee a genuine route for staff to challenge automated outcomes.
Ultimately, software cannot salvage a flawed deployment strategy. South Africa’s workforce is ready to advance into the digital age, leaving executives with no excuse for failure. Boards will only gain a commercial advantage when they reject top-down decision-making and superficial IT procurement to fundamentally re-engineer how employees and technology interact. Those who align infrastructure investments with human strategy will gain genuine productivity, while those who ignore the people most affected will simply watch their expensive systems fail to deliver.
* Chiloane is the career consulting leader at Mercer Africa.
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