The impact of artificial intelligence on Colorado’s workplaces is no longer some futuristic notion — it is here.
And for many of the state’s executives, balancing the tremendous power and possibilities of AI against its potential drawbacks is an ever-increasing concern.
New data from the found that AI is transforming job functions faster than most organizations can adapt.
In last year’s survey, 78% of respondents said generative AI, agentic AI and machine learning will have the biggest impact on workplaces over the next three to five years. That percentage jumped to 93% this year.
The capacity AI has to remake a company’s workforce is already playing out.
Earlier this year, Denver-based Angi Inc. cut 350 jobs as part of an AI-driven efficiency effort, while Block tied to automation.
More broadly, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, this week laid off 8,000 workers as the company remakes itself with AI.
The speed at which changes occur in the state might be stemmed, in part, by a significant gap between AI ambition and AI execution, the survey highlighted.
Only 7% of organizations report enterprise-wide adoption. Half remain in the pilot phase, 33% describe themselves as scaling across multiple functions, and 10% are either in early exploration or have not begun using AI at all.
The roundtable’s survey draws on executives from across more than a dozen industries and organizations ranging from under 100 Colorado-based employees to more than 5,000, with both statewide and Front Range operations represented.
“Colorado employers are not waiting for the future of work to arrive, they’re retooling how they hire, where they invest and how they partner with organizations. They’re moving faster than ever before,” said Eyal Darmon, who leads Accenture’s public service AI practice, addressing business leaders Tuesday at the United Club Lounge at Empower Field at Mile High during a workforce summit hosted by COBRT.
“The real question that this room has to grapple with today is whether the rest of the ecosystem, policymakers, education, workforce development – frankly, all of us – how can we all keep up with that pace?” Darmon said.
“The biggest mistake I see companies make is waiting till they have it all figured out — every day you’re waiting, you’re falling behind. Every day you’re waiting is a day of exponentially less productivity,” said Sean Young, Nvidia’s Director of Enterprise Industry Marketing. More than use Nvidia AI technologies, along with 15,000 global startups in Nvidia Inception.
The company, known for inventing the graphics processing unit, is a leader in AI innovation, including what it describes as the for building quantum processors.
Young told attendees he views ChatGPT and other large language models as relatively low risk, and said companies should make AI tools widely available so employees can experiment and figure out how to use them.
“If you take a step back and look at this from an academic perspective, 500 years from now, this is a historical moment that we’re living in,” Young said.
“Yes, jobs are going to change, the world is going to change, but this is your opportunity to do something about it.”
Darmon said at Accenture, AI has transformed both how the company operates internally and the nature of what it delivers to clients.
“I think I sat on these couches last year and told you that you should think of AI as having 1,000 interns supporting you. Today, it’s 1,000 Ph.D. students that can go down into a level of capability that you’ve never fathomed before, and it’s not slowing down,” Darmon said.
He also said “durable” human skills, such as relationship-building, will be increasingly important for success, as technical skills become more widely accessible.
When employers were asked in the survey what skill gaps are most difficult to fill, 90% pointed to durable, human skills such as critical thinking, communication, and adaptability. That far outpaced digital and technical skills (43%), senior leadership pipeline (47%), and skilled trades (30%).
More specialized technical categories rated slightly lower, including AI literacy and applied AI skills, industry-specific certifications, business and financial acumen, and company- or role-specific skills.
The survey said this does not mean technical skills are unimportant, but that employers value the capacity to learn, adapt and collaborate at least as much as any specific technical competency.
Despite AI’s growing impact on work, the Colorado Business Roundtable report said employers are not bracing for mass displacement.
When asked how AI will affect workforce demand in their industry, 40% respondents said they expect no significant change in workforce size, and another 17% expect moderate or significant increases. Only 3% anticipated a significant decrease, while the rest expected modest reductions or remained uncertain.
Still, that outlook contrasts with developments over the past year, as companies in Colorado and across the country have already carried out layoffs while restructuring operations around the technology.
Companies including Atlassian, Crypto.com, HP, IBM, Salesforce, Pinterest, Dow, UKG and Snap, among others, have connected to AI initiatives.
Major companies like Microsoft, Meta and Google are not only adopting AI, but have also set of its use among its employees. In one case, a mid-sized consulting and accounting firm has even made employee bonuses dependent on .
These policies have further fueled skepticism about AI’s growing role in the workplace.
For Jeremy Bray, a former software developer who recently lost his job, the increasing use of AI across the industry has disrupted his expectations of a stable career path in tech.
“There hasn’t been nearly the amount of jobs that there used to be,” he said, adding that many companies over hired during and after the COVID-19 pandemic before later scaling back and shifting resources toward AI.
“I’ve been applying to 300 jobs a week and I hardly ever hear back from any of them — and then with people getting laid off from the bigger companies by the tens of thousands, there’s just so much competition for what few jobs there are. Itap making it really hard.”
When asked about the uncertainty about how AI could reshape jobs, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Innovation Architect Baradji Diallo said the picture that emerges is one of transformation rather than elimination.
Yet Diallo said he realized when it comes to AI, most problems are not about the technology itself. The problem, he said, is adoption.
“It shouldn’t be human versus AI, it should be humans actually changing how we work because of AI,” Diallo said.
“We have to ask ourselves, ‘what is AI actually enabling us to do?,’ because reality is, it will replace some of those low-level tasks that are repetitive.”
Bray shared a similar view. Online customer service and call center roles could likely be among the first jobs to be displaced.
He said many of the tasks performed in those positions can already be handled by , systems that autonomously performs tasks by designing workflows with available tools.
With AI agents now across a range of industries and applications, including customer support, appointment scheduling, data analysis, software coding, healthcare administration and financial services, Bray said he began to recognize how significantly AI could shape the future of his career.
“If you can just tell a bunch of agent processes to go and build something, there’s not a whole lot for you to do other than wrangle those processes and oversee what they do,” he said.
The roundtable’s survey said 73% of respondents are not tracking productivity or performance outcomes tied to their AI investments. Among those that are, the most common measures include cost reduction, time savings and customer experience, while fewer track metrics such as revenue per employee or error reduction.
Only 13% cited AI and data talent gaps as a primary obstacle, suggesting the bottleneck is organizational readiness, not workforce supply.
Yet as concerns like Bray’s become more common, the survey found companies are beginning to adjust how they structure work around AI.
Employers are rethinking which tasks belong to humans, which belong to machines, and how the two should interact. The most common organizational response is redesigning work processes and job roles (60% of respondents), followed by combining automation with human augmentation (47%). Workforce reduction was cited by just 13%.
“I think a lot of (companies) don’t seem to understand how imperfect a lot of the systems are,” Bray said.
Bray, who has worked in the tech industry for more than a decade, said he has used ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Claude for coding, data analysis and creative work.
“Working with the systems, I find all the time where they can give bad results. They aren’t consistent by nature. They don’t give the same results every time when you ask the same question. There’s no really good way of quality control,” he said.
