Not all employees are excited about AI. There, I said it.

I know I’m contradicting oodles of hype. But just as backward baseball caps don’t have universal fashion appeal, AI doesn’t look helpful to everyone, all the time. A survey of finance departments by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that just 8% of respondents are less satisfied with their jobs because of AI. But as the report points out, that doesn’t mean that employees will automatically accept it.

CFOs should also take steps to keep employees from becoming disillusioned when they are deploying AI for financial management—whether it be the more traditional type that seeks answers to problems, or generative AI (GenAI), which generates new content based on prompts.

Rules for AI engagement

According to research, work has to satisfy three psychological needs to keep employees engaged:autonomy, competence, and relationships.

Autonomy helps employees take action and make decisions independently without managers breathing down their necks or having overly strict rules that dictate how tasks should be done.Employees also need to feel that they do their jobs well. Awards and even pay raises aren’t enough; a sense of competence must flow from doing the work itself. Having autonomy and a feeling of competence helps employees feel connected to their colleagues and to the organization in general.

How to avoid disillusionment with AI in finance

It’s easy to see how AI could aid—or intrude on—any of these needs. Here’s how to nail the first and avoid the second:

Use AI to strengthen autonomy and competence

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of mostly rich countries, conducted a series of finance industry case studies to gauge employees’ reaction to AI. In one, a UK financial firm used AI to help with a range of repetitive administrative tasks involving mortgage underwriting, interest rate adjustments, commercial banking, and brokerage. Humans then reviewed its outputs. Employees saw the technology as an improvement because their work became less administrative and they had more time to support customers and colleagues, do research, plan, and manage projects. In other words, using AI resulted in lots of hits of autonomy and competence dopamine.to gauge employees’ reaction to AI.

Keep an eye on speed

Automating the easy tasks leaves employees with the same amount of work but with a more packed schedule. Seventy-five percent of finance industry employees surveyed by the OECD said that AI had increased the pace at which they worked. Faster pace can lead to burnout, in which hopelessness obliterates autonomy, competence, and relationships.

Keep some mundane tasks

The OECD studied a Canadian manufacturing company at which managers were so concerned about overwhelming employees with “higher value-added tasks” that they purposely left some of the easy stuff untouched by AI. That gave workers a mental health break.

Require employees to use AI but let them ignore it

MIT Sloan's 2022 Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy Global Executive Study and Research Project found that the best way to get employees to use AI regularly in their workflow is to require it, but give them free rein to override or ignore its advice. That may seem paradoxical until you consider that requiring everyone to use AI drives a sense of equality (and connectedness). No one is being singled out; everyone must do it. Meanwhile, when AI recommendations are optional, we feel more competent (the machine isn’t always right) and autonomous (machines aren’t the bosses of us).

Properly prepare employees for AI adoption

Right now, AI is mostly being used to automate work, which continues a process that has been going on for decades. In a few months or years, employees will forget the mundane tasks that AI rescued them from and will need other ways to feel competent and autonomous.

Meanwhile, to the extent that traditional finance work is solo in nature, AI will make connectedness more important. Increasingly, finance employees will be stewards of AI in routine tasks—think exception handling—rather than doing the tasks themselves. That will give them more time for higher-order tasks, but those tasks will be more complex and require more help—not just from AI, but from other colleagues.

It's an opportunity that CFOs should seize to keep their employees more engaged as AI permeates their workflow. They can start by creating team structures that emphasize collaboration or by introducing practices that emphasize more problem-solving, creativity, and empathy during meetings.

Attending to employees’ psychological needs today will make the difference between AI actually enhancing how finance employees work together and AI being just another technology tool.