A poll published last week by CNBC and Generation Labs — a research firm that focuses on Americans aged 18 to 34 — landed a number that every business leader deploying AI should sit with for a moment.

Eighty-one percent of young Americans do not trust Palantir CEO Alex Karp to act responsibly on AI. Seventy-six percent don’t trust Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Seventy-nine percent don’t trust Peter Thiel. Around 70% distrust Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk. The only AI-adjacent executive in the survey with net positive trust was Microsoft’s Satya Nadella — and even he only cleared 35%.

The 1,088-person survey asked Americans aged 18 to 34 a simple question about each of nine prominent AI industry figures: do you trust them to act responsibly on AI? In every case, the majority said no.

That’s not a PR problem for Silicon Valley. That’s a workforce problem for every company trying to roll out AI.

The Career Fear Is Real and Growing

The distrust in leaders is striking, but the career data is what should sharpen your attention.

In the same poll, 45% of respondents said AI would have a negative impact on their careers. Only 10% said it would help them. Nearly half of adults aged 18 to 29 now believe AI does more harm than good — up from 36% just a year ago. And 79% of Americans aged 18 to 34 say AI will reduce the number of U.S. jobs over the next decade, up from 73% in 2025.

These aren’t fringe views. This is the mainstream opinion of the generation of workers your business is actively hiring.

Here’s what that means in practice: when you roll out a new AI tool to your team, roughly half of the people in the room already believe this technology is working against them. Not because they haven’t thought about it — because they have, and they’ve reached a conclusion.

That’s not a technology problem. No amount of better AI will fix it. It’s a trust and competency problem, and it shows up as adoption resistance, quiet sabotage, and the kind of passive non-compliance that kills AI ROI before the project even gets started.

Why This Distrust Gap Matters More Than Benchmark Scores

The AI industry has spent the past two years in a race to prove AI is capable. Model benchmarks, speed records, capability demos — the conversation has been almost entirely about what AI can do.

This poll is a signal that the public conversation has moved on to a different question: who is actually in charge of this, and do I trust them?

The answer, overwhelmingly, is no. And that distrust isn’t irrational. It comes from watching an industry repeatedly promise safe, beneficial AI while racing to deploy systems that demonstrably displace workers, hallucinate facts, and operate with limited accountability.

What the data shows is that trust in AI isn’t determined by model performance. It’s determined by whether people feel like they have agency in an AI-shaped world.

This is exactly why AI literacy matters — not as a company checkbox but as a genuine competitive advantage. When workers understand what AI can and can’t do, when they feel capable rather than threatened, adoption resistance drops. When they feel like AI is something happening to them, it doesn’t.

What This Means for Business

If you’re deploying AI across your business — whether that’s workflow automation, customer-facing voice agents, or internal copilots — you’re managing a workforce that, statistically, is more likely to distrust the technology than embrace it.

There are three practical moves here:

Invest in literacy, not just tools. The gap between AI capability and AI trust is a skills gap. Teams that understand the tools, their limitations, and how to work alongside them don’t just adopt faster — they get better outcomes. This is the exact problem EDNA Learn exists to solve: structured upskilling in data and AI across your entire organisation, not just your technical teams.

Give people agency in the process. AI deployments that fail rarely fail because the technology didn’t work. They fail because the people using it were never brought along. Change management isn’t soft — it’s the variable that separates a 40% productivity gain from an expensive shelf project.

Be honest about the transition. The 79% who think AI will reduce jobs aren’t wrong. It will change the shape of work significantly. Pretending otherwise erodes the trust you need to actually navigate the transition. Leaders who acknowledge the disruption honestly, while showing a credible path through it, are the ones who build the kind of workforce that can actually compete.

The Opportunity Inside the Distrust

Here’s the counterintuitive read on this data: the fact that trust is so low is actually an opportunity for businesses that do this right.

If 81% of people don’t trust the AI industry’s leaders, the bar for being a trustworthy organisation with AI is genuinely not very high. Being transparent about what you’re deploying and why, genuinely investing in your team’s capability, and giving people real input — these aren’t unusual things to do. But they’re rare enough that they’ll make you stand out.

The businesses that win the next decade aren’t necessarily the ones who deploy AI fastest. They’re the ones who build a workforce that can actually use it well. That starts with understanding why so many people don’t trust AI yet — and doing something about it.

---

Want to build AI capability across your team? Explore EDNA Learn — structured AI and data training for business teams, from beginner to advanced. Or if you’re thinking through a broader AI strategy, book a discovery call to talk through where Omni Advisory can help.