AI’s forgotten workforce: Why the future of workplace health depends on the 80 per cent 

For the past decade, employers have worked hard to close the gap between office-based and frontline employees. They have invested in wellbeing programmes, communication platforms, digital benefits and employee experience initiatives designed to ensure that everyone, regardless of where they work, feels connected, informed and supported. 

Artificial intelligence now presents the next test of that ambition. Much of the conversation surrounding workplace AI has focused on knowledge workers. Organisations are introducing AI copilots to summarise meetings, draft emails and improve productivity. Yet there is remarkably little discussion about the employees who make up the majority of the workforce. 

Around 80 per cent of workers globally do not spend their day behind a desk. They work in hospitals, warehouses, manufacturing plants, retail stores, construction sites and on the road. They are often the people delivering products, caring for patients, serving customers and keeping businesses running. 

If AI is designed primarily for office workers, organisations risk creating something far more significant than a technology gap. They risk creating a new workforce divide. 

It is an uncomfortable possibility, but one Frank Wolf, Co-founder of Staffbase believes organisations need to confront now. 

“We’re seeing almost every AI strategy being discussed designed for the twenty per cent who sit at a desk,” he says. “That’s not an oversight. It’s a choice.”  

Those three words fundamentally change the conversation. The challenge facing organisations is no longer whether they should adopt AI. Most already are. The real question is who they are designing it for. 

From productivity gap to opportunity gap 

The first generation of workplace AI has understandably focused on administrative tasks. 

Knowledge workers can already ask AI to draft reports, analyse documents, summarise meetings and answer questions in seconds. 

Meanwhile, many frontline employees still rely on phone calls, paper manuals or waiting for someone with the right expertise to become available. 

“The risk is already real,” says Wolf. “Knowledge workers have AI assistants that help them write, summarise and decide faster. A worker on a production line is still calling someone and waiting.” 

It is easy to see this purely as a productivity issue but, in reality, it runs much deeper. 

Wolf says: “A productivity gap doesn’t stay a productivity gap. Give it long enough and it hardens into a capability gap which eventually becomes a career-progression gap.” 

That observation should resonate with every employer thinking seriously about workforce health. 

For years, organisations have talked about creating equitable employee experiences. If one part of the workforce gains immediate access to knowledge, learning and decision support while another continues to rely on slower, manual processes, the divide is unlikely to remain confined to productivity. It could influence confidence, development, engagement and future career opportunities. 

AI is becoming a workforce health issue 

Perhaps the biggest misconception about workplace AI is that it is simply another technology project. Wolf argues the reality is far more practical. 

“A nurse acting on outdated safety information or a logistics driver who can’t get an instant answer to a compliance question aren’t engagement problems, they’re business risks.” That shifts the discussion away from efficiency and towards organisational health. 

Access to accurate information affects how safely people work, how confidently and quickly they make decisions and how supported they feel in their roles. In many frontline environments, reducing the time it takes to find trusted information is not simply about saving minutes. It can reduce stress, improve performance and help prevent mistakes before they happen. 

Increasingly, AI should perhaps be viewed not simply as a productivity tool but as part of the infrastructure that supports healthier, safer workplaces. 

Why communication matters more than technology 

If there is one theme running consistently through Wolf’s thinking, it is that organisations often overestimate the technology and underestimate the communication required to make it successful. 

“It’s almost always communication,” he says. “What causes fear is the absence of a clear, honest narrative from leadership about what AI means for the people doing the work. When that narrative is missing, employees fill the gap themselves, and what they fill it with is anxiety.” 

This is familiar territory for anyone working in workplace wellbeing. Whether introducing a wellbeing strategy, organisational restructure or new technology, trust is rarely built through announcements from head office. It is built through conversations. 

“The fix isn’t a better FAQ page,” Wolf says. “It’s treating communication as the implementation itself.” 

His emphasis on frontline managers is particularly striking. “If a shift supervisor can’t answer basic questions about what AI means for the team, everything from headquarters will land in a vacuum.” 

In other words, organisations cannot separate AI strategy from leadership capability. The two are becoming increasingly intertwined. 

Designing from the edge 

One of the most compelling ideas to emerge from our conversation was deceptively simple. Most organisations, Wolf argues, begin designing AI at the centre of the organisation before attempting to adapt it for everyone else. 

An inclusive strategy turns that thinking on its head. “What does the hardest-to-reach employee actually need in the context they’re actually working in?” 

It is a question that extends well beyond AI. 

The strongest workplace wellbeing strategies increasingly begin by understanding where support is hardest to access rather than where it is easiest to deliver. Wolf believes AI should follow exactly the same principle. 

That means designing mobile-first experiences, ensuring tools work with limited connectivity and building systems that employees can genuinely trust because they are drawing on accurate, governed information. 

Importantly, it also changes how success should be measured. Rather than celebrating adoption figures among corporate teams, organisations should ask whether the employees furthest from headquarters are experiencing meaningful improvements in their day-to-day work. 

Reach before intelligence 

Wolf believes organisations that are successfully introducing AI share one common characteristic. They invested in communication before they invested in intelligence. 

“They had already invested in a channel that reaches every employee, including the ones with no corporate email. Reach has to come before intelligence. You can’t deploy AI to people you can’t already communicate with.” 

It is a reminder that AI cannot solve problems created by weak communication, fragmented systems or poor organisational design. In many respects, it simply exposes them more quickly. 

A different conversation about careers 

Much of the debate around AI focuses on replacing work or making people more efficient. Wolf believes employers should be having an entirely different conversation. 

“For frontline workers in technical roles, the knowledge that matters has always been held by the most experienced people. If institutional expertise is captured and governed properly, a day-one employee can reach it immediately and that compresses the time it takes to become proficient.” 

Rather than limiting opportunity, AI has the potential to democratise expertise. 

For organisations facing skills shortages, ageing workforces and growing demand for continuous learning, that could become one of its most transformative benefits. Five years from now, organisations will almost certainly have access to more powerful AI than they do today. But, that alone will not determine who succeeds. 

“The companies with a genuine AI advantage won’t just have the best models,” Wolf says. “They’ll have the cleanest, most governed data layer.” 

But perhaps his most important point has little to do with technology at all. 

The organisations that build AI around their most connected employees may create faster head offices. The organisations that begin with their least connected employees will create stronger organisations. 

For years, workplace wellbeing has challenged employers to think beyond office walls and design healthier organisations for everyone. Artificial intelligence presents exactly the same challenge. The question is no longer whether organisations will adopt AI – it is whether every employee will benefit from it. If the answer is no, employers will not simply have created an AI strategy. They will simply created a better office.