Nearly Half of GCC Employees Fear AI Threatens Their Jobs, Despite Seeing It as a Business Enabler

A Region Confident in AI, But Uneasy About What It Means for Jobs

A new regional workforce survey has put a number on a tension that has been building quietly across Gulf offices for the past two years. The inaugural GCC People Pulse, produced by Employee Experience Exchange and Ipsos from responses by 1,500 employees across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, found that seventy three per cent of workers see AI as a critical business enabler and believe it will make their organisation more competitive. At the same time, almost half, forty nine per cent, said they are concerned about what AI means for their own job security.

That split view is not a contradiction so much as a realistic read of where AI adoption currently sits in the region. Employees appear able to hold two things true simultaneously: that AI strengthens their employer's competitive position, and that the same technology could eventually reduce the need for their own role, a tension consistent with earlier findings that AI is intensifying work for many Gulf employees rather than simply reducing it.

Confidence in Employers Remains High Despite the Worry

The survey's more striking findings sit outside the AI questions entirely. Eighty one per cent of respondents said they would recommend their organisation as a great place to work, nine points above the global benchmark, while seventy seven per cent said they are confident in their organisation's future direction, twenty two points above the global average. Ruth Dance, co founder of EXE, said this kind of advocacy is one of the clearest signs of genuine engagement and is directly linked to business performance and talent retention, adding that when advocacy weakens it becomes far harder to attract and keep good people in a competitive market.

Co founder Lorna King attributed the strong confidence scores to clear communication and visible leadership, arguing that when employees understand where an organisation is headed and see leaders acting accordingly, they become genuine advocates rather than passive employees, something that matters as GCC enterprises continue to race to scale AI adoption across the region.

Strain Is the Quiet Risk Behind the Numbers

Beneath the confidence figures, the survey also flagged a wellbeing concern that employers will need to watch closely. Fifty four per cent of respondents said they had experienced constant strain in recent months, and only eighteen per cent reported a complete absence of strain at work. James Tarbit, Ipsos's global head of employee experience, warned that strain creates anxiety, fatigue and eventually burnout, and has a measurably negative impact on decision making, team dynamics and overall performance, even among employees who have no immediate plans to leave.

For HR and technology leaders reading the survey together, the practical takeaway is that AI rollout plans cannot be separated from workforce communication plans. A workforce that trusts its leadership's direction but fears for its own role, and is already under strain, is one where AI transformation programmes need transparency built in from the outset rather than added after concerns surface.