monday.com report says AI and software adoption still lag real usage

monday.com’s World of Work report points to a familiar failure mode in modern offices: companies buy the software, but never do the harder work of getting people to use it well. The message is not that employees are anti-change. It is that adoption stalls when leaders underinvest in training, skip the explanation layer, and treat a rollout like a procurement win instead of a workflow redesign.

What the report is really saying

The report, commissioned by Qualtrics, surveyed 3,736 employees, managers, and executives across seven countries. Its headline findings are stark enough to matter for anyone who builds, sells, or manages software inside monday.com: 82% of respondents say they use work and project management software to drive organizational efficiency, yet 57% say the number of tools they use has increased compared with the previous year. In the largest enterprise companies, actual utilization drops to 71%, and nearly half of employees at those companies say they do not use AI at all.

That gap is the story. It means the challenge is not simply whether a company has enough licenses, enough features, or enough vendor enthusiasm. It is whether the rollout creates a habit, a policy, and a reason for people to change the way they work. The report’s most useful insight is that software adoption is a management problem long before it is a product problem.

Why the implementation gap keeps widening

The report’s 89% figure is the clearest clue: 89% of respondents said a better strategy for using and collaborating with tools would help manage technological change. That is a blunt reminder that companies are not short on tools so much as short on coordination. When teams keep adding software without changing how work moves through approvals, handoffs, permissions, and accountability, usage fragments and people fall back to old habits.

That is where shelfware starts. If employees do not trust a tool, do not understand what it is for, or do not receive enough training to use it inside their actual workflow, the purchase becomes a line item instead of a productivity gain. For monday.com teams, that should be familiar territory. The company’s own research points again and again to the same dynamic: adoption is won or lost in the messy middle between launch and routine.

For product teams, that means a feature release is not truly successful when it ships. It is successful when customers can absorb it into everyday work without needing a second rollout just to explain the first one. For sales, it means the real objection is not always price. It is fear that the buyer will sign a contract and then struggle to drive usage across the organization. For customer success, it means renewal risk often begins the moment a customer realizes the tool is underused.

Transparency is part of the product

The report’s human-centered language matters because it matches how workers actually react to AI. People are more willing to experiment when they understand how a tool works, what data it touches, and where the limits are. monday.com says its AI trust center is built around clear indications and actionable information about how AI operates and manages data, which is exactly the kind of transparency employees look for when AI starts to show up inside daily work.

That matters because AI anxiety is not just a fear of replacement. It is also a fear of ambiguity. If people do not know whether a bot is making recommendations, taking actions, or simply summarizing a task, they are less likely to rely on it. Clear permissions, visible controls, and plain-language explanations do more than soothe nerves. They make the software legible enough to use.

For managers, the practical lesson is simple: do not announce AI as a vague upgrade. Explain what it will do, what it will not do, and who is responsible when it makes a mistake. Without that clarity, usage may spike briefly after launch and then flatten out.

Training is not a soft benefit, it is the adoption engine

monday.com’s data suggests the problem is not just tool sprawl, but tool sprawl without enablement. When 57% of employees say they are juggling more tools than they were a year earlier, the hidden cost is not only cognitive overload. It is the training burden that companies quietly assume workers will absorb on their own.

That assumption rarely holds. Employees can learn a new interface, but they need help understanding where it fits in the process. They also need to see how it saves time in their own role, not just in a demo. That is why the report’s emphasis on shared growth and communication is more than corporate language. It is the operational fix.

A manager-friendly rollout should include:

• role-specific training, not one generic onboarding session
• clear examples of the workflow the tool replaces or improves
• named owners for permissions, access, and escalation
• follow-up check-ins after launch, not just a kickoff
• usage metrics tied to outcomes, not just license counts

That is especially important in large enterprises, where utilization tends to lag even when budgets are healthy. Buying more software does not solve the adoption problem if employees are already buried under too many systems.

How monday.com is framing the future of work

The company’s own recent research shows how its thinking has evolved. In 2025, monday.com’s AI research surveyed 500 directors in the US and UK and analyzed millions of workflows inside the monday.com platform. The point was not simply that AI was coming. It was that AI was entering what the company called an operational era, where tools have to prove near-term value in real workflows.

That line of thinking shows up again in monday.com’s 2026 investor materials, which describe the company as an AI work platform serving more than 250,000 customers worldwide. It also shows up in the product direction, with monday magic, monday vibe, monday sidekick, and native agents positioned as part of a broader shift from work management to work execution.

The financial backdrop helps explain why this matters. monday.com reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $351.3 million, up 24% year over year, after reporting fourth-quarter 2024 revenue of $268.0 million, up 32% year over year. Growth at that scale is not the same thing as adoption depth, though. The company can add customers and still run into the same old problem inside each customer account: getting people to actually change how they work.

That is why the World of Work report still feels current. It is less a snapshot than a warning. The next phase of workplace software will not be won by the companies that can announce the most AI features. It will be won by the companies that can make those features understandable, trusted, and embedded in the daily flow of work. For monday.com, that is the whole game.