Microsoft work trends and the paradox of AI adoption

MANILA, Philippines – On August 7, Microsoft Philippines held an event to launch the 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report. The findings in this year’s report are revelatory and some of the stats provide answers to the questions that are often asked: are Filipinos ready for AI, and if yes, then what steps need to be taken to unlock the promises of AI?

You can find a copy of the report here. Microsoft says, “the report is based on a survey of 20,000 workers across 10 countries and trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals. It shows the Philippines pulling ahead of the global curve in using AI to expand what people can achieve at work.”

The big thing I noticed in this report is a shift in attention: in past years, the question that this and other reports like it asked was, are individuals ready for AI? This year’s report says that individuals are ready but the systems and organizations around them are not.

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The report highlights some key findings where Filipino AI users ranked higher than the global average. Among those are 65% of Filipino AI users saying critical thinking is the most important human skill, compared to a global average of 46%. Perhaps even more striking is that 93% treat AI output as a starting point, compared to a global average of 86%.

Beyond users, the report identifies “Frontier Professionals” who they define as people “who routinely use AI agents for multi-step workflows, rethink business processes, and help establish new quality standards for AI-assisted work.” The number of Filipinos who fall under this definition is 25% of workers in the study, compared to a global average of 16%. A surprising piece there was that 53% of these Frontier Professionals deliberately accomplish certain tasks without AI, so that they can keep their skills sharp.

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We are ready

Filipinos are ready, and there’s no question of whether we are “behind” because all these numbers tell us that Filipino AI users are performing above global averages. So the bottleneck, or what the report is calling the “Transformation Paradox,” is at the organization-level. In order to unlock all the innovation and possibilities that adopting AI systems have to offer, organizations have to lead and incentivize.

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Only around one-third of Filipino users in the study say that their leadership is clearly and consistently aligned on AI. While this is above the global average of 26%, it still reveals that most organizations aren’t approaching AI in a way that upgrades their systems and processes. Interesting that we have so many “Frontier Professionals” who are driving innovation, but only 25% report that they are incentivized or rewarded for reinventing how they work.

These findings line up with my own experience in training people and companies in AI. Most people will receive introductions to AI, basic prompting, or other entry-level courses that prepare them to use it. But what this report and my own experiences align on is that impactful AI adoption is not necessarily a technology problem, but rather an organizational culture and change management project. Workflows need to be redesigned and new ways of working adopted.

As I listened to the presentation of findings, I also found myself wrestling with another paradox. Here I was looking at this report showing how much promise AI holds for innovation and improving work, while just days earlier, the BBC released a piece that discusses how AI is having a negative impact on jobs, exerting pressure on companies to automate, and in certain cases, making BPO workers feel like they are training their own machine replacements. The BBC piece isn’t alone; unfortunately it’s easy to find reporting and academic research that shows how labor is severely negatively impacted not only by AI adoption, but just the idea of AI being able to take work. On top of actual AI capacity putting certain kinds of labor in peril, there’s also AI-washing, which is using AI as an excuse for layoffs or other oppressive behavior.

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This gets at the heart of the drastically different experiences that people are having with AI. The author Cory Doctorow is always a great resource to turn to in times like this, and writing in his latest book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to to Life after AI * he makes a distinction between Centaurs (if you’ve read Snow Crash* the term will be familiar) people who use AI to be able to do things, and Reverse Centaurs, or people who are “used” by machines. He writes, “When you find yourself surrounded by people swearing that a given tool is worse than useless and others swearing that it has made their lives easier and better, you can bet that former groups is made up of reverse centaurs who’ve had AI imposed upon them, the latter group is all centaurs who’ve gotten to make up their own minds about where, when, and how to use AI tools.”

The Centaur sounds a lot like the “Frontier Professional” while the Reverse Centaurs are people whose work is being replaced or devalued because of the adoption of AI systems. The opportunity identified by the Work Trend Index and the challenges of labor displacement are both in the hands of organizational leadership.

**It’s up to leadership **

This is perhaps where we shift from looking at what technology is capable of to what organizational leadership and values are really made of, especially in a challenging business context and an information ecosystem filled with all kinds of narratives and perspectives. Will leaders approach AI as a tool for workforce reduction and cost-cutting? Or will they see it as a technology that will help them serve customers better, create more value, and make work better for their teams?

The Work Trend Index calls for organizations to think of themselves as learning systems, and the need to build institutional knowledge, which is grounded on building up and around people. As per the report, “Building that infrastructure also requires coordinated reinvention across four roles: employees, who rearchitect their work around intent and review; leaders, who redesign processes around outcomes and agent autonomy; IT, who builds the infrastructure for agent operations at scale; and security, who ensures that trust is woven into the system itself.”

In effect, and perhaps something that a lot of AI adoption advocates have observed, for AI to be impactful to businesses, it needs to be human-centered and empowering. And as the report shows, it’s up to the leadership in organizations to chart the way, because their people are ready.

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