Workers who use AI daily or several times a week are more than twice as likely as occasional users to fear their jobs will disappear within five years, according to a Gallup study of nearly 30,000 U.S. employees surveyed across four waves between 2023 and early 2026. The 6.8-percentage-point gap that manager respect closes, and the 11.1-point gap that organizational care closes, reframes AI anxiety from a technology problem into a leadership problem.

What does the data actually show?

Gallup's analysis found that the more often workers touched AI, the more they worried about being displaced. That relationship weakened sharply when employees reported strong manager relationships.

Among frequent AI users, those who strongly agreed they were respected at work showed a 6.8-percentage-point smaller link between AI use and job-loss fears. For workers who strongly agreed their organization cared about their wellbeing, the gap widened to 11.1 points.

"The positive effects are really concentrated among the workplaces where workers feel like there's some trust with their managers," said Christos Makridis, a senior researcher at Gallup in Washington who led the analysis.

How did Gallup measure change over time?

Most AI surveys freeze a moment and compare different workers. Gallup tracked the same employees across four waves from 2023 through early 2026.

"We're not comparing Joe with John," Makridis said. "We're comparing Joe in 2023 with Joe in 2024 and 2025 and 2026."

That within-person design let researchers separate the effect of changing AI use from the effect of changing workplace experiences. Workers who felt more respected between waves reported less anxiety, regardless of how often they touched AI tools.

Why does familiarity make workers more fearful?

The data challenges the assumption that workers grow calmer about AI as they learn it. For some employees, hands-on exposure makes displacement feel concrete.

"If you're a professional services worker, that is a coder or a software engineer, you're like, wow, this can work 20 times faster," Makridis said.

Generative AI has lowered the technical bar. Workers now interact with capable systems using everyday language instead of the specialized skills that once gated access. A 2024 study in Science estimated AI-powered software could affect roughly half of all work tasks, with about one in five workers seeing at least half of their own tasks reshaped.

That visibility may explain why frequent users report more worry, not less.

What happens when anxiety spreads through a team?

The study linked job-loss concerns to measurable workplace outcomes. Workers who feared displacement also reported lower engagement, lower job satisfaction, higher burnout, and more active job-search behavior.

"When your workers are anxious about going in and being replaced and their livelihoods, that makes for a less productive workplace because it means that they're not going to be as concentrated," Makridis said.

The effect compounds at the team level, he added.

"That sort of toxicity can really spread and create a culture, a set of norms, language, time, etc., that just eats away at organizational productivity and creativity."

What can managers actually do?

Makridis rejected sweeping change programs in favor of small, repeated signals of respect.

"Sometimes a precondition to unlocking that creativity is literally just appreciating the person for what they're doing every day," he said. "If somebody is fulfilling their responsibilities, acknowledge that."

"You don't need to throw a birthday party, although that might be nice to do," he added. "But it's just small things that end up being cumulatively large."

Those signals matter most when corporate AI strategy stops at a productivity mandate, Makridis said. Without context, employees lose sight of where their own contribution fits.

"Managers are a critical lever by which they can inculcate that growth mindset among teams and workers."

What does this mean for HR leaders?

The findings land as many employers try to grow output without expanding headcount, and as turnover climbs. Manager training has lagged. Recent research found many supervisors feel unprepared to lead employees who use AI heavily, leaving a gap that Gallup's data suggests carries direct retention and productivity costs.

The path forward, in Makridis's reading, runs through the people closest to the work.

"Managers are the courts," he said. "They're the ones that are reckoning every day, on the small issues, big issues and everything in between."

That puts HR's next decision squarely on the front line: which managers have the training, the support, and the trust to do the same.