As AI adoption spreads across the workforce, employees are feeling pressure to become proficient as companies push for quick and efficient implementation.
This adoption also comes with growing anxiety about the impact of AI on job growth and security. But Indeed’s Workplace Trends Editor Priya Rathod said her research points to a more encouraging reality.
“[AI] is rearranging work, but it’s not eliminating the need for workers,” she told Newsweek. “We’re seeing that as employees try to upskill across multiple industries, they’re focusing a lot of their upskilling efforts on AI.”
With new technologies come more opportunities for women to continue to make strides in the workplace. According to McKinsey & Company’s 2025 Women in the Workplace report, women make up about half of the workforce, but only 29 percent of C-suite positions. Those pipelines to leadership start early in employees’ careers with entry-level women finding fewer sponsorship and promotion opportunities than men.
In partnership with Plant-A Insights Group, Newsweek recently published its latest ranking of America’s Greatest Workplaces for Women, which rates companies across industries on a five-star scale based on their efforts to recruit, retain and promote women at every stage of their careers. The ranking evaluates factors such as eliminating toxic cultures, enacting equitable policies and fostering supportive environments where employees can thrive.
Companies across industries continue integrating new technology to boost productivity and evaluate performance, making AI competency an increasingly essential skill for employees looking to advance. Higher AI exposure also helps employees develop more transferable skills to make them desirable and resilient candidates for employment, according to the Brookings Institution.
Amid rising safety and data privacy concerns, top companies need to be prescriptive about what AI tools they use and how they align with their goals and values.
“You need to be clear on what those decisions are and aren’t within your organization, depending on the industry,” Tera Ladner, the deputy global CISO at Aflac, told Newsweek.
She said AI tools need to be tested, validated and under constant review to ensure the results are “trusted, traceable and explainable” to prevent this “magnificent tool” from being used the wrong way.
“Everybody has great ideas around how AI can change business,” she said. “You see it in every article we read, everything we watch on the news. But the reality is that AI depends on foundational things being correct – your data, your models, the correct prompting – and AI isn’t just something you can turn on and let it go.”
While useful and exciting, Ladner said AI is “not the silver bullet the hype cycle makes it out to be.”
In today’s landscape, not all AI adoption is made equal. McKinsey found that entry-level women are more worried than their male counterparts about how the use of AI will affect their jobs. They also received less of the support needed to use AI effectively. Only 21 percent of entry-level women are encouraged by their manager to use AI tools, compared with 33 percent of men at their level, the report found. And those who are encouraged to adopt AI are more likely to use it.
Rathod said employers need to understand that when employees feel a sense of purpose and satisfaction at their job, they are 11 percent more likely to use AI.
“So as employers continue to try to get their employees to adopt AI, they can’t miss the major point behind it, which is when your employees feel a sense of positive work well-being at your company, they’re going to adopt AI and they’re going to feel confident using it,” she said.
At consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which has a 4-star rating on Newsweek’s ranking, Generative AI Lead Alison Smith said there’s a cultural understanding that the push for AI is motivating people to “level up” their skillset for the evolving technological landscape. Staying on the cutting-edge makes the company appeal to a new age of skilled and enthusiastic employees and, when there’s a new role open at the company, Smith said AI is used to match their skills to the job description and find people internally who might be a good fit.
“It’s actually helped us operationally identify more people across our 30,000-plus employees that might really be great for a role on a specific client project,” she said.
Brookings found that there are over 37 million U.S. workers who are in industries with high AI exposure, like software development and financial advising. Women make up a higher percentage of workers in professional industries than in blue-collar jobs, making them more likely to be exposed to AI than men, who are more evenly split between professional and trade work.
“What we’re seeing is that a large majority of women are comfortable with AI and they’re using AI,” Rathod said. “[Women] are being required to adopt AI more than men simply because of the roles they currently sit in.”
Organizations that are serious about closing the gender gap in corporate leadership, therefore, must ensure women aren’t left out of the AI push by developing comprehensive training and compliance strategies that are accessible and inclusive for all employees.
Goodwin & Proctor is one of the largest law firms in the country and received a 5-star rating on Newsweek’s Greatest Workplaces for Women ranking.
Chief Talent Officer and Assistant General Counsel for Employment Heidi Goldstein Shepherd told Newsweek that AI is key to the firm’s strategy to be “the first elite industry-built law firm that fuses legal excellence and strategic advisory services.”
As an apprentice-based industry, Shepherd said Goodwin encourages young lawyers to grow by “sitting at the knee of the person more senior than you and really learning from them.”
While she acknowledges that “AI is going to change that,” Goodwin is working to preserve that model and added that she’s “not overly worried people are going to be left behind.”
“We work really closely with our women to ensure that they are progressing in their careers,” she said. “We want to make sure that we are offering them opportunities to off ramp and on ramp as they’re both leaving and coming back [from parental leave]. And, ideally, some of these AI tools will really help with that experience.”
Rathod has spent a decade at Indeed, which received a 4.5-star rating on Newsweek’s ranking. As the head of the Parents and Caregivers ERG at the company, Rathod knows that women value flexibility at work.
By cutting down the time spent on administrative tasks and improving the speed and clarity of communications, Rathod said AI can help prioritize more meaningful work and “bridge the gap” in leadership to help get women “closer to where they want to be” professionally.
“As we talk about keeping women in the workforce, a big reason they’re exiting is because their workplaces aren’t set up for women, and they have to manage all these parental responsibilities,” she said. “Being able to work remotely and stay in the workforce and rise in the workforce is particularly important.”
