A meme posted last month to a Slack channel for employees at Electronic Arts shows a cartoon man asking a trio of CEOs what they want. They answer in unison: “AI!” Then the man asks, “AI to do what?” The CEOs reply, “We don’t know!” The man follows, “When do we want it?” The CEOs cheer again: “Right now!” Dozens of the video-game company’s staff responded with crying laughing emojis.
The post and others like it seen by Business Insider provide a snapshot of a common, and roiling, divide between white-collar leaders and employees over the role AI should play in the workplace today. As companies from Microsoft to Shopify mandate and, in some cases, even track employees’ usage of AI, many workers are concerned that using it creates more work for them, not less, and that they may be facilitating being replaced by the technology.
Two recent global surveys underscore how fierce this feud has become. One study of 7,000 professionals, funded by HR software company Dayforce, found that 87% of executives use AI daily, compared with 57% of managers and 27% of employees. Another study with 2,500 respondents commissioned by work marketplace Upwork found that 92% of C-suite leaders expect AI to boost productivity, while 40% of employees blame it for heavier workloads.
At Electronic Arts, maker of “The Sims,” “Madden NFL,” and several other megapopular video-game franchises, leadership has spent the past year urging its nearly 15,000 employees to use AI for just about everything — from creative projects like cranking out code and concept art to managerial work like scripting conversations with direct reports about sensitive topics such as pay and promotions, Business Insider has learned.
Employees in some areas of the business are expected to complete multiple AI training courses, use AI tools daily to accelerate their work, and view generative AI as a “thought partner,” internal documents show. One sample chatbot prompt advises managers on how to talk to a direct report whose performance is negatively affecting business results but who believes otherwise. Another guides employees on how to phrase constructive questions when a sought-after promotion is denied.
Some Electronic Arts staffers who spoke with Business Insider under the condition of anonymity say the AI tools they’re encouraged to use, including the company’s in-house chatbot ReefGPT, produce flawed code and other so-called hallucinations that they need to correct. Others say that creative staff are expected to train AI programs on their own work, and that they fear the technology will ultimately slash demand for talent, such as character artists and level designers.
A spokesman for Electronic Arts declined to comment for this story.
One recently laid-off Electronic Arts employee, who held a senior quality-assurance design position, says that AI was able to perform a key part of his job — reviewing and summarizing feedback from hundreds of play testers. He suspects that this was at least partly why he was among about 100 of his colleagues who were let go this past spring from the company’s Respawn Entertainment studio.
While the AI divide plays out across corporate America and beyond, it’s especially fraught in creative fields like the video-game industry. In a survey of 3,000 video-game creators, nearly a third of respondents said generative AI was having a negative impact on the sector, a 12-point increase from 2024. About half said they were very concerned about the ethics of generative AI in game development, up from 42% last year. Respondents also cited concerns about intellectual property theft, energy consumption, and potential biases. The study was jointly conducted by the Game Developers Conference, research firm Omdia, and the media outlet Game Developer earlier this year.
It’s a problem when the dogs won’t eat the dog food.Doug Creutz, an analyst at TD Cowen
The findings raise a thorny question: If the very workers who helped pioneer online networks, mobile apps, and virtual worlds are balking at AI, how can leaders in any industry expect their employees to buy in?
“It’s a problem when the dogs won’t eat the dog food,” says Doug Creutz, an analyst at TD Cowen who covers the entertainment industry.
Artificial intelligence in one form or another has long played a role in video games. When you fire up “Madden,” you’re competing against a computer-controlled team. When you play “Mass Effect,” you’re fighting computer-generated aliens. But the modern AI affecting nearly every profession is different. It powers new ways of searching the internet, creating images and video, writing text and code, summarizing information, and automating tasks. And all kinds of employers, from banks and hotels to hospitals and retailers, are embedding it into their workflows.
The average total AI spend by companies roughly doubled in 2024 from the previous year to $10.3 million, according to Bain & Co. The management-consulting firm looked at companies whose annual revenues ranged from $50 million to more than $5 billion.
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Part of the challenge that company leaders face with AI adoption is that AI has developed a prickly reputation in the workplace and beyond. It’s become known for producing résumés and emails that sound formulaic, and images that closely resemble copyrighted artwork. Students are using AI tools to cheat, and over-engagement with chatbots has driven some people to delusional behavior and suicide.
Company leaders are looking at AI through a different lens. They see the technology as a time-saver, productivity booster, and always-available resource for workers. And with AI, companies may be able to slash one of their costliest expenses — human capital.
Workers, meanwhile, increasingly recognize that this means their jobs could change or go away, which is something leaders can’t ignore, said Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
“Don’t expect your employees to jump up and down at the opportunity to work themselves out of a job,” he said.
Leaders at Electronic Arts have described AI as existential for the company’s future.
“AI in its different forms has always been central to this creative journey. We all remember playing against the AI, and it has evolved into today’s innovations in generative AI,” the company’s CEO and chairman, Andrew Wilson, said at an Investor Day event in September 2024. “This remarkable technology is not merely a buzzword for us. It’s the very core of our business.”
EA acknowledged potential risks to its embrace of AI in its annual 10-K Securities & Exchange Commission filing from May.
“We are integrating artificial intelligence tools and technologies into our business and development processes,” the filing says. “The use of artificial intelligence might present social and ethical issues that, if not managed appropriately, may result in legal and reputational harm, cause consumers to lose confidence in our business and brands and negatively impact our financial and operating results.”
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Electronic Arts has been embracing AI while grappling with financial pressure. In the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2025, net income fell 9.4%; in the final quarter of that year, net income plummeted 28%.
The overall game industry’s workforce has been contracting in recent years following a pandemic-era boom. An estimated 14,600 jobs were cut in 2024 alone, according to an online tally of termination announcements and news reports compiled by Farhan Noor, a technical artist in California.
Today, about 318,000 people worldwide work in the video-game industry, down roughly 9% from a 2022 peak of roughly 350,000, according to Aldora Intelligence. The decline is due to studio consolidation, increased automation, and shifting production models, says Joost van Dreunen, CEO of the analytics firm and a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Still, consumer spending on video games is growing. Aldora projects global game software sales are projected to rise 4.6% to $196.4 billion in 2025.
Get the fit right, and even AI skeptics become power users.Jackson G. Lu, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management
Not all workers are opposed to AI. People prefer AI to humans in situations where they see the AI as more capable than humans and where personalization isn’t necessary, according to a recently published meta-analysis of 163 studies published in the Psychological Bulletin.
For example, in tasks like predicting future sales of a product or estimating the art period of a painting, AI is perceived as more capable than humans and personalization is perceived as unnecessary, so people prefer AI to humans. But in other contexts — from hotel reception service to administering lab experiments — people tend to favor humans over AI.
This helps explain why some game developers and other tech enthusiasts are resisting AI, says Jackson G. Lu, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management who led the meta-analysis. “Where work is highly personalized, identity-laden, or creative, employees want a human in the loop,” he says.
To drive up AI adoption, Lu recommends that leaders start by steering workers toward tasks that AI clearly handles better than humans and where personalization is unnecessary, such as numeric estimation and forecasting tasks. Then, he advises gradually incorporating AI into tasks that involve taste, fairness, or empathy—while preserving human oversight and allowing people to customize the results.
“Get the fit right,” says Lu, “and even AI skeptics become power users.”
For now though, there are many dogs reluctant to eat the dog food, and they’re getting nippy.
“It sort of goes back to Charlie Brown and Lucy pulling the football away,” said Creutz, the Wall Street analyst, referring to how workers are skeptical that AI will benefit them. “There’s a fundamental lack of trust.”
Sarah E. Needleman is Business Insider’s leadership & workplace correspondent.
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