From ‘Fear Factor’ to ‘Cognitive Fatigue’: KPMG Director in the Quarter Where Everyone Started Thinking About AI Differently

At the same time, according to Rahsaan Shareslead director and aIQ program at KPMG US, said the third quarter is when people’s approach to technology fundamentally shifted. She said the “fear factor” disappeared as more people used these tools, replaced by “cognitive fatigue.” Expressing this sentiment, the KPMG report highlights a significant decline in employee resistance, from 47% last quarter to just 21% now. More than half of the workforce now either accepts or actively embraces AI agents. Technology departments lead this responsibility, with 95% reporting using an agent for productivity gains, closely followed by operations and risk management.

“Human in the loop” is both reassuring and exhausting

Shears said C-suite leaders tell her that as more and more employees interact with technology, either through enterprise tools or participating in proof-of-concept through their organization, “they can see where this technology can be an enabler.” But based on their maturity, they are not in a place where they can completely replace human workers. There must be a “human in the loop or a human being in the loop.”

One of Spears’ defining insights is the changing relationship between humans and artificial intelligence at work. Spears describes this technology as a “baby” – capable of impressive feats but still immature and requiring context, guidance and supervision. “It’s not easy in all areas – software development, for example, is much more advanced. But for most enterprise uses, it still needs human intervention,” she notes.

Spears believes this constant need for human skills has made employees more comfortable with AI, viewing it as a tool that empowers them rather than replaces them. “I think people have found this constant need for human engagement comforting,” Spears said, emphasizing the unique skills needed now: critical thinking, questioning, and adaptability. She said she believed “renaissance skills” would be increasingly important, but explained that this did not mean the workforce would be full of poetry graduates, but that “the art of thinking, the art of asking questions” would be crucial to being a human being in the loop.

When asked if people have found AI tools to be bad or not producing a return on investment, Shears said people have gone from expecting that AI will be as good at work as someone with a lot of experience to understanding that, although it can be much faster than humans at many things, like a small child, it can cause a lot of damage without close supervision.

Rethinking success and ROI in the age of artificial intelligence

Both KPMG and Spears argue that traditional business metrics are insufficient to recognize the transformative impact of AI. According to the survey, 78% of leaders say traditional KPIs miss much of the value of AI. The same goes for ROI, Spears said A failure that received much media coverage For many AI pilots to achieve this. “I think the traditional metrics that we looked at are not going to tell us the whole story because we will never go into a very lengthy analysis because we don’t necessarily know how to measure all the right indicators. I’m very interested and interested in how we achieve that,” she said, adding that KPMG was looking at a wide range of signals to evaluate the results of the AI.

KPMG data reflects this shift, with enterprise leaders now tracking productivity (97%), profitability (94%), and quality improvements (91%) as evidence of AI’s impact on the business, even as broader enterprise results continue to evolve.

When asked if this will reshape the look and feel of entry-level work, Spears said it’s accurate, because she’s noticed a tendency among younger workers, who have grown up on social media and constant access to iPhones, to “trust” their devices and technology. In the case of AI, because “at an earlier stage of its maturity, they have to be more skeptical, which is a different kind of relationship than they have historically been from a digital interaction perspective.” This coincides with KPMG’s findings that 56% of leaders expect to reshape their entry-level hiring process within the year. When asked if employers need to reconsider entry-level work to be less menial and more cash-oriented, Spears replied that this is already happening: “We’re seeing it.”