More than half of employees in Spain (57.9%) said they were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very concerned’ about the impact that AI may have on their workplace within five years, according to the AI and Labour Market study in Spain prepared by Randstad Research in Spain.

This percentage breaks down into 27.5% who are “very worried” and 30.4% who say they feel “somewhat worried.”

The 58% figure increases over a period of 10 years, when 59.3% of employees say they feel “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about the arrival of AI. Over a twelve-month period, the percentage of concerned workers is 50.1%. The study surveyed 1,500 people.

“Although it is a still incipient technology, AI will gradually penetrate companies and impact the way many employees work, which, among other things, poses the challenge of training them in the use of this type of tools,” Valentín Bote, director of Randstad Research, said.

Randstad also found that professionals who use AI in some way are still a minority. Only 17.3% of employees use AI at work, according to the survey, which also shows that more than half of the responses are divided between those who claim that their company does not use AI (27.5%) or those who ignore it (24.8%).

In addition to the 17.3% who claim to regularly use it in their work, another 16.4% recognise that they interact with AI in another way, such as, for example, by being users of some input generated by these innovative tools in other phases of the production process. In general terms, 54.5% of employees say that they do not use AI in their company, compared to 45.5% who say they have already tried it.

The impact that AI is having on the work of employees of those companies that have already used this technology are very diverse. Nearly half of the workers in these companies detect improvements in decision-making (43.6%) and in the speed with which they can make decisions (52.9%).

Last month, a study by Randstad Spain showed generative AI for companies in Spain will lead to the loss of nearly 400,000 net jobs in the next ten years.