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Survey reveals not only an ‘AI readiness gap’ but also an emerging phenomenon of ‘AI shame’ in the workplace—especially in the C-suite

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A new survey reveals a striking “AI readiness gap” in the modern workplace: those using AI tools the most—including top executives and Gen Z employees—are often the least likely to receive meaningful guidance, training, or even company approval for their use.

The findings come from WalkMe, an SAP company, which surveyed over 1,000 U.S. workers for the 2025 edition of its “AI in the Workplace” survey. Nearly half of employees (48.8%) admit to hiding their use of AI at work to avoid judgment, suggesting that something like “AI shame” is a real phenomenon in the workplace. This discomfort is especially pronounced at the top, with 53.4% of C-suite leaders admitting they conceal their AI habits—despite being the most frequent users. Entry-level workers aren’t exempt, but the paradox deepens at the executive level, highlighting how even the most empowered employees remain uneasy.

Gen Z: eager, but unsupported

Gen Z’s relationship with AI appears to be both enthusiastic and anxious. A striking 62.6% have completed work using AI but pretended it was all their own effort—the highest rate among any generation.

More than half (55.4%) have feigned understanding of AI in meetings. Their behavior is context-dependent: 28.4% exaggerate their AI use to some, while 13.5% downplay it to others. Intriguingly, this can be dependent on who they’re speaking with. But only 6.8% report extensive, time-consuming AI training, and 13.5% received none at all. This is the lowest of any age group. Despite this, an overwhelming 89.2% use AI at work—and just as many (89.2%) use tools that weren’t provided or sanctioned by their employer. Only 7.5% reported receiving extensive training with AI tools. This is a strikingly small advance from 2024, when the same survey from WorkMe found 7.0% reported extensive training—just a 0.5% increase.

Sharon Bernstein, chief human resources officer for WalkMe, told Fortune in an interview that “Companies are not educating enough about this whole thing,” saying that they seem to not be facilitating use of AI tools. They “are not training their employees enough today, or guiding … Even if you are an amazing CIO and you’re allowed to buy a few different tools for AI, how much was it adopted? Like, for real?”

The AI class divide and a productivity paradox

Access to AI training and guidance increases with rank and company size. Only 3.7% of entry-level employees receive substantial training compared to 17.1% of C-level executives. Younger and junior staff remain unsupported—a gap that risks cementing an “AI class divide” where the most frequent users are left to navigate on their own.

AI is changing work, and the survey suggests not always for the better. Most employees (80%) say AI has improved their productivity, but 59% confess to spending more time wrestling with AI tools than if they’d just done the work themselves. Gen Z again leads the struggle, with 65.3% saying AI slows them down (the highest amount of any group), and 68% feeling pressure to produce more work because of it. Nearly one in three are deeply anxious about AI’s impact on their jobs, saying they worry “a lot” about its impact on their jobs. Confidence is mixed: only 45% of Gen Z say they’re “very confident” using AI—less than Millennials (56.3%) and tied with Gen X (43.2%).

How this fits into the picture

These gaps, around AI readiness and varying levels of AI shame, fit into an emerging picture of a confusing, if not chaotic, implementation of AI into the workplace, from the entry level all the way to the C-suite. For instance, more than half of professionals report being overwhelmed by AI training initiatives, saying that it feels like “a second job”—adding stress and longer hours, often with little tangible benefit to workflows. While it’s speculative to link lack of proper training to the bombshell MIT study showing a staggering 95% failure rate for generative AI pilots at large enterprises, there is clearly an issue going from the drawing board to the factory floor. Furthermore, this disconnection between corporate hype and actual business value is fueling investor worries about a potential AI bubble.

Another major study, the first of its kind in the field, came out from Stanford and top economist Erik Brynjolfsson, a thought leader in the AI field. Since late 2022, his team found, when generative AI exploded onto the scene, there really has been the start of a statistically significant decline in entry-level hiring, in jobs directly exposed to automation by AI. This means that mastery of AI tools will be hugely important for entry-level workers, and this WorkMe survey suggests they are getting the least amount of training.

Finally, the survey fits into the trend of “shadow AI,” where workers are overwhelmingly using these tools, but companies are further behind in official adoption of AI tools. Many colleges are banning AI tools, meanwhile, as they try to stem what they perceive as a rampant “cheating” crisis. From the market, where investors fear a bubble, to the entry level, where workers are trying to match their shadow use of AI to their actual performance, to the C-suite, where leaders are under pressure to revolutionize their companies and get results with this new technology, there’s an emerging gap between theory and reality.

Bernstein said that from her perspective as a human resources leader, “first of all, you want people not to fear to admit that they use it, right?” She urged companies to be transparent about how they’re really planning to use AI to displace the fear of AI tools being used to replace workers, on the one hand, and even facility with using it, on the other hand. “I don’t really think that we can literally replace employees,” she added, “maybe in very specific positions, but in general, I think companies are now in a stage that they need to educate their team members about it.”

Rising anxiety, falling readiness

Worry about AI’s effect on jobs is intensifying. 44.8% of workers are worried, and the proportion “very worried” has spiked since last year. Gen Z feels this most acutely: 62.2% say they worry about AI’s impact, with 28.4% “very worried”—the highest rate across age groups. Stress levels are up for 27% of Gen Z, the highest of any generation. Yet hope persists: 89.6% want to learn more about AI, and 86% believe AI proficiency is critical for career success.

The findings point to an urgent need for employers to bridge the AI readiness gap, offering clear guidance, comprehensive training, and transparent policies. Those on the leading edge of AI adoption—whether in the boardroom or among Gen Z—need support, not secrecy. As tools proliferate and expectations rise, organizations risk eroding trust, productivity, and emotional wellbeing unless this issue is addressed head-on.

For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing. 



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Netflix–Warner Bros. deal sets up $72 billion antitrust test

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17 minutes ago

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December 5, 2025

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Netflix Inc. has won the heated takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Now it must convince global antitrust regulators that the deal won’t give it an illegal advantage in the streaming market. 

The $72 billion tie-up joins the world’s dominant paid streaming service with one of Hollywood’s most iconic movie studios. It would reshape the market for online video content by combining the No. 1 streaming player with the No. 4 service HBO Max and its blockbuster hits such as Game Of Thrones, Friends, and the DC Universe comics characters franchise.  

That could raise red flags for global antitrust regulators over concerns that Netflix would have too much control over the streaming market. The company faces a lengthy Justice Department review and a possible US lawsuit seeking to block the deal if it doesn’t adopt some remedies to get it cleared, analysts said.

“Netflix will have an uphill climb unless it agrees to divest HBO Max as well as additional behavioral commitments — particularly on licensing content,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Rie. “The streaming overlap is significant,” she added, saying the argument that “the market should be viewed more broadly is a tough one to win.”

By choosing Netflix, Warner Bros. has jilted another bidder, Paramount Skydance Corp., a move that risks touching off a political battle in Washington. Paramount is backed by the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison, and his son, David Ellison, and the company has touted their longstanding close ties to President Donald Trump. Their acquisition of Paramount, which closed in August, has won public praise from Trump. 

Comcast Corp. also made a bid for Warner Bros., looking to merge it with its NBCUniversal division.

The Justice Department’s antitrust division, which would review the transaction in the US, could argue that the deal is illegal on its face because the combined market share would put Netflix well over a 30% threshold.

The White House, the Justice Department and Comcast didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. 

US lawmakers from both parties, including Republican Representative Darrell Issa and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren have already faulted the transaction — which would create a global streaming giant with 450 million users — as harmful to consumers.

“This deal looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare,” Warren said after the Netflix announcement. Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, said in a social media post earlier this week that a Warner Bros.-Netflix tie-up would raise more serious competition questions “than any transaction I’ve seen in about a decade.”

European Union regulators are also likely to subject the Netflix proposal to an intensive review amid pressure from legislators. In the UK, the deal has already drawn scrutiny before the announcement, with House of Lords member Baroness Luciana Berger pressing the government on how the transaction would impact competition and consumer prices.

The combined company could raise prices and broadly impact “culture, film, cinemas and theater releases,”said Andreas Schwab, a leading member of the European Parliament on competition issues, after the announcement.

Paramount has sought to frame the Netflix deal as a non-starter. “The simple truth is that a deal with Netflix as the buyer likely will never close, due to antitrust and regulatory challenges in the United States and in most jurisdictions abroad,” Paramount’s antitrust lawyers wrote to their counterparts at Warner Bros. on Dec. 1.

Appealing directly to Trump could help Netflix avoid intense antitrust scrutiny, New Street Research’s Blair Levin wrote in a note on Friday. Levin said it’s possible that Trump could come to see the benefit of switching from a pro-Paramount position to a pro-Netflix position. “And if he does so, we believe the DOJ will follow suit,” Levin wrote.

Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos had dinner with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last December, a move other CEOs made after the election in order to win over the administration. In a call with investors Friday morning, Sarandos said that he’s “highly confident in the regulatory process,” contending the deal favors consumers, workers and innovation. 

“Our plans here are to work really closely with all the appropriate governments and regulators, but really confident that we’re going to get all the necessary approvals that we need,” he said.

Netflix will likely argue to regulators that other video services such as Google’s YouTube and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok should be included in any analysis of the market, which would dramatically shrink the company’s perceived dominance.

The US Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the transfer of broadcast-TV licenses, isn’t expected to play a role in the deal, as neither hold such licenses. Warner Bros. plans to spin off its cable TV division, which includes channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT, before the sale.

Even if antitrust reviews just focus on streaming, Netflix believes it will ultimately prevail, pointing to Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime and Walt Disney Co. as other major competitors, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. 

Netflix is expected to argue that more than 75% of HBO Max subscribers already subscribe to Netflix, making them complementary offerings rather than competitors, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing confidential deliberations. The company is expected to make the case that reducing its content costs through owning Warner Bros., eliminating redundant back-end technology and bundling Netflix with Max will yield lower prices.



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The rise of AI reasoning models comes with a big energy tradeoff

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December 5, 2025

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Nearly all leading artificial intelligence developers are focused on building AI models that mimic the way humans reason, but new research shows these cutting-edge systems can be far more energy intensive, adding to concerns about AI’s strain on power grids.

AI reasoning models used 30 times more power on average to respond to 1,000 written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability or which had it disabled, according to a study released Thursday. The work was carried out by the AI Energy Score project, led by Hugging Face research scientist Sasha Luccioni and Salesforce Inc. head of AI sustainability Boris Gamazaychikov.

The researchers evaluated 40 open, freely available AI models, including software from OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp. Some models were found to have a much wider disparity in energy consumption, including one from Chinese upstart DeepSeek. A slimmed-down version of DeepSeek’s R1 model used just 50 watt hours to respond to the prompts when reasoning was turned off, or about as much power as is needed to run a 50 watt lightbulb for an hour. With the reasoning feature enabled, the same model required 7,626 watt hours to complete the tasks.

The soaring energy needs of AI have increasingly come under scrutiny. As tech companies race to build more and bigger data centers to support AI, industry watchers have raised concerns about straining power grids and raising energy costs for consumers. A Bloomberg investigation in September found that wholesale electricity prices rose as much as 267% over the past five years in areas near data centers. There are also environmental drawbacks, as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc. have previously acknowledged the data center buildout could complicate their long-term climate objectives. 

More than a year ago, OpenAI released its first reasoning model, called o1. Where its prior software replied almost instantly to queries, o1 spent more time computing an answer before responding. Many other AI companies have since released similar systems, with the goal of solving more complex multistep problems for fields like science, math and coding.

Though reasoning systems have quickly become the industry norm for carrying out more complicated tasks, there has been little research into their energy demands. Much of the increase in power consumption is due to reasoning models generating much more text when responding, the researchers said. 

The new report aims to better understand how AI energy needs are evolving, Luccioni said. She also hopes it helps people better understand that there are different types of AI models suited to different actions. Not every query requires tapping the most computationally intensive AI reasoning systems.

“We should be smarter about the way that we use AI,” Luccioni said. “Choosing the right model for the right task is important.”

To test the difference in power use, the researchers ran all the models on the same computer hardware. They used the same prompts for each, ranging from simple questions — such as asking which team won the Super Bowl in a particular year — to more complex math problems. They also used a software tool called CodeCarbon to track how much energy was being consumed in real time.

The results varied considerably. The researchers found one of Microsoft’s Phi 4 reasoning models used 9,462 watt hours with reasoning turned on, compared with about 18 watt hours with it off. OpenAI’s largest gpt-oss model, meanwhile, had a less stark difference. It used 8,504 watt hours with reasoning on the most computationally intensive “high” setting and 5,313 watt hours with the setting turned down to “low.” 

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google released internal research in August that estimated the median text prompt for its Gemini AI service used 0.24 watt-hours of energy, roughly equal to watching TV for less than nine seconds. Google said that figure was “substantially lower than many public estimates.” 

Much of the discussion about AI power consumption has focused on large-scale facilities set up to train artificial intelligence systems. Increasingly, however, tech firms are shifting more resources to inference, or the process of running AI systems after they’ve been trained. The push toward reasoning models is a big piece of that as these systems are more reliant on inference.

Recently, some tech leaders have acknowledged that AI’s power draw needs to be reckoned with. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the industry must earn the “social permission to consume energy” for AI data centers in a November interview. To do that, he argued tech must use AI to do good and foster broad economic growth.



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SpaceX to offer insider shares at record-setting valuation

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1 hour ago

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December 5, 2025

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SpaceX is preparing to sell insider shares in a transaction that would value Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker at a valuation higher than OpenAI’s record-setting $500 billion, people familiar with the matter said.

One of the people briefed on the deal said that the share price under discussion is higher than $400 apiece, which would value SpaceX at between $750 billion and $800 billion, though the details could change. 

The company’s latest tender offer was discussed by its board of directors on Thursday at SpaceX’s Starbase hub in Texas. If confirmed, it would make SpaceX once again the world’s most valuable closely held company, vaulting past the previous record of $500 billion that ChatGPT owner OpenAI set in October. Play Video

Preliminary scenarios included per-share prices that would have pushed SpaceX’s value at roughly $560 billion or higher, the people said. The details of the deal could change before it closes, a third person said. 

A representative for SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The latest figure would be a substantial increase from the $212 a share set in July, when the company raised money and sold shares at a valuation of $400 billion.

The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, earlier reported that a deal would value SpaceX at $800 billion.

News of SpaceX’s valuation sent shares of EchoStar Corp., a satellite TV and wireless company, up as much as 18%. Last month, Echostar had agreed to sell spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $2.6 billion, adding to an earlier agreement to sell about $17 billion in wireless spectrum to Musk’s company.

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The world’s most prolific rocket launcher, SpaceX dominates the space industry with its Falcon 9 rocket that launches satellites and people to orbit.

SpaceX is also the industry leader in providing internet services from low-Earth orbit through Starlink, a system of more than 9,000 satellites that is far ahead of competitors including Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Leo.

SpaceX executives have repeatedly floated the idea of spinning off SpaceX’s Starlink business into a separate, publicly traded company — a concept President Gwynne Shotwell first suggested in 2020. 

However, Musk cast doubt on the prospect publicly over the years and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said in 2024 that a Starlink IPO would be something that would take place more likely “in the years to come.”

The Information, citing people familiar with the discussions, separately reported on Friday that SpaceX has told investors and financial institution representatives that it is aiming for an initial public offering for the entire company in the second half of next year.

A so-called tender or secondary offering, through which employees and some early shareholders can sell shares, provides investors in closely held companies such as SpaceX a way to generate liquidity.

SpaceX is working to develop its new Starship vehicle, advertised as the most powerful rocket ever developed to loft huge numbers of Starlink satellites as well as carry cargo and people to moon and, eventually, Mars.



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