- 39% of UK workers now turn to an AI chatbot first for work answers.
- However, 35% have received no AI training or guidance in the past year.
- 50% of 25–34-year-olds (the group shaping tomorrow’s workplace habits) now go to AI before a colleague, manager, or search engine.
London, UK – 27 October, 2026 – O’Reilly, a knowledge company delivering the expertise that drives business outcomes, released new research revealing that training and governance have failed to keep pace with AI-assisted work, leaving employees exposed to costly mistakes. AI has quietly become the first place most UK workers turn for answers, overtaking colleagues, managers, and even search engines.
Yet despite this rapid behavioral shift, 35% of employees say their organization has provided no AI-related learning or guidance whatsoever in the past 12 months. This means no formal training, no upskilling on topics like prompt engineering, no hands-on workshops, nothing. Just 21% of employees have received a formal AI training course, and only 16% have had training specific to their actual role.
"We’re seeing a workforce that has fully embraced AI as a first port of call, but the safety net hasn’t caught up with the speed of adoption," said Alexia Pedersen, SVP International at O’Reilly. "People are moving faster than their organizations’ training and governance. And that gap is where mistakes happen. The answer isn’t to slow down AI adoption; it’s to close the gap with the right training, verification habits, and trusted expertise to back it up."
Organizations are already paying the cost of that confidence gap. Of the employees using AI-generated answers in their work, 39% admit they’ve acted on an AI response that later proved inaccurate, incomplete, or unsuitable, with 17% saying this has happened more than once. Despite this, only 24% say they always verify an AI-generated answer before using it, meaning the majority are relying on outputs that can’t necessarily be fully trusted.
Employees themselves know what would help. When asked “what would most increase their confidence in using AI for important work decisions”, the top two answers were human review (39%) and better AI training (35%). This comes ahead of clearer policies or governance documentation alone.
"This is a training and trust problem, not an AI problem," continued Pedersen. "Organizations that invest now in structured, role-specific AI training and in building a culture of verification rather than uncritical acceptance will be the ones who turn today’s AI adoption into a genuine productivity advantage."
In response to this growing need for better support for workers as AI evolves, O’Reilly has launched Expert Intelligence, which lives inside the AI tools organizations already use. Its toolkit provides a direct, secure connection to O’Reilly’s curated knowledge base, ensuring that every response from LLMs is traceable to a named expert and a confirmed date of publication. Engineers, architects, and organizational leaders can use Expert Intelligence to de-risk decisions, compare implementation approaches, and ensure trust is built-in to AI tools.
For more information on Expert Intelligence, visit https://www.oreilly.com/online-learning/expert-intelligence.html.
Methodology Research conducted by Censuswide on behalf of O’Reilly among 2,000 UK employees between 18 and 22 September 2026.
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