One in Four Employees Ready to Use AI at Work but Face Restrictions

Embedika, an AI solution developer, together with the Rabota.ru service, surveyed how employees of Russian companies work with corporate information and documents, what difficulties they face, and which AI functions they consider most useful. According to the results, 39% of employees use public AI services such as ChatGPT, YandexGPT, or GigaChat for work tasks: 13% do so regularly, 26% occasionally. Meanwhile, 61% do not use such tools: 35% see no need, 20% would like to use AI but do not for various reasons, and 6% reported a direct corporate ban. Thus, at least 26% of workers can be considered potential users of AI services, as they either already want to use them or are restricted by internal company rules. Organizations impose bans fearing data leaks when working with public AI services. However, without safe corporate alternatives, such restrictions may hinder automation where employees are already ready to use AI. Among the tasks that take the most time when working with documents and information, 36% of respondents cited verification: searching for and fixing errors, reconciling versions and data relevance. Another 35% mentioned reading and analyzing large documents and reports, and 31% cited searching for necessary files and data in corporate systems, email, and work chats. The most demanded AI function was smart search: 46% of employees would like to use a tool that helps find needed information based on the meaning of the query, not just keywords. Another 43% noted consolidating data from different sources into a table, and 35% AI verification for errors and compliance with standards. Functions related to text preparation are also notable but less demanded than analytical ones: 21% chose automatic summarization of documents, 20% generation of drafts from templates. The study also showed a gap between employee demand and the current level of AI adoption in corporate systems: 51% of respondents said their companies either have no built-in AI functions or they are unaware of their existence. Among available tools, the most common are chatbots for knowledge base responses at 22%. Automatic summarization is available to 15% of employees, template-based draft generation to 14%, smart search to 13%, and AI data analytics to 9%. Among employees who use AI in work tasks, the share of those reporting acceleration is almost three times higher than those experiencing slowdown. 30% of users reported increased speed, another 11% noticed no significant changes. Only 10% said tasks became more time-consuming due to the need to verify AI answers. Aykanysh Orozbaeva, business development director at Embedika, commented that employees often spend time not on complex decisions but on searching, reconciling, and verifying information, and AI can reduce this load if embedded in standard corporate systems and aligned with company data security requirements.