{"id":8907,"date":"2026-08-29T01:07:04","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T05:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/2026\/08\/ai-strategy\/ai-transformation-starts-with-building-employee-trust\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T01:07:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T05:07:04","slug":"ai-transformation-starts-with-building-employee-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/2026\/08\/ai-strategy\/ai-transformation-starts-with-building-employee-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"AI transformation starts with building employee trust"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Share with your CHRO<\/h2>\n<p>Voya Financial&#8217;s chief technology and operations officer Santhosh Keshavan makes the case that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ciodive.com\/news\/AI-training-upskilling-voya-financial\/828896\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">workforce trust, not technology capability, is the real constraint on enterprise AI adoption<\/a>. The company pushed a five-hour generative AI literacy program to all 11,000 employees, shaped by more than 1,000 of them, and reached near-100% certification in three months. Today 98% of employees are actively using Microsoft Copilot, averaging 24 prompts per user weekly. A subsequent internal agent-building tournament produced nearly 300 employee-submitted agents competing for enterprise deployment.<\/p>\n<h2>What this means for your business<\/h2>\n<p>The companies most at risk of stalled AI programs aren&#8217;t the ones with bad technology choices. They&#8217;re the ones where the workforce quietly waits to be told what to think. Voya&#8217;s numbers are genuinely unusual: 98% active Copilot usage at a financial services firm with 11,000 employees isn&#8217;t a pilot stat, it&#8217;s a culture signal. If your own AI tools show strong procurement spend but thin daily engagement, the gap is almost certainly sitting in the trust layer, not the feature set.<\/p>\n<p>The piece is authored by Voya&#8217;s own technology chief, so the argument naturally flatters a model where IT-led literacy programs drive adoption rather than, say, business unit autonomy or tool-first experimentation. That tilt is worth noting because it may understate how much the program&#8217;s success depended on specific conditions: a CEO-level mandate, a financial services culture already trained on compliance-heavy onboarding, and a workforce that couldn&#8217;t easily opt out. Five hours of training reaching 100% completion in three months doesn&#8217;t happen through good curriculum design alone. It happens when leadership makes non-participation uncomfortable. That&#8217;s a legitimate strategy, but it&#8217;s a different capability than &#8220;build good training.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The agent tournament is the more interesting signal. When 300 employee-submitted agents emerge from a three-month-old literacy program, the organization has crossed from AI awareness into distributed AI judgment, meaning front-line workers identifying and prototyping process changes without waiting for a center of excellence to greenlight them. That&#8217;s the condition most CHROs and CIOs claim to want but rarely architect for. The question worth weighing now isn&#8217;t whether to run a similar program, but whether your current performance management and rewards structure would actually surface and promote the people who built the best agents, or route their work back into a backlog.<\/p>\n<p><em>Based on reporting from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ciodive.com\/news\/AI-training-upskilling-voya-financial\/828896\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">AI transformation starts with building employee trust<\/a>, originally published 2026-08-28 11:43:00.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Share with your CHRO Voya Financial&#8217;s chief technology and operations officer Santhosh Keshavan makes the case that workforce trust, not technology capability, is the real constraint on enterprise AI adoption. The company pushed a five-hour generative AI literacy program to all 11,000 employees, shaped by more than 1,000 of them, and reached near-100% certification in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8908,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144],"tags":[174],"tmauthors":[],"class_list":["post-8907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai-strategy","tag-chro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8907"},{"taxonomy":"tmauthors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tmauthors?post=8907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}