The Charter AI Pulse surveyed 5,002 US desk workers, managers, and executives who use AI, and only 10.5% say AI is making both their work and their life much better. Charter calls them the thriving group.
The strongest predictor of who gets there is agency, or feeling involved in how AI fits into your job. Running agents in the background ranks 25th on Charter's list of conditions.
This is the core of what we mean by people-centric AI transformation: transformation works when it starts with real work, real workflows, and real leadership behavior. Charter's data now puts numbers behind all three.
What Does Having a Say in AI Actually Look Like?
Agency is unevenly spread. Managers are 1.8 times more likely than workers to say they have it (67% vs. 37%), and 36% of workers say they are mostly reacting to AI being imposed on their jobs. One systems analyst in Charter's interviews summed it up: "It's a tool. It's not a mandate."
Frequency matters too. People who use AI multiple times a day are twice as likely to benefit as people who use it a few times a week. Agency still ranks above it.
So how do you hand people a real say? You let them redesign their own recurring work, at a level of detail where their judgment counts.
That is what our OVER framework is built for. Nobody can redesign a job title, so OVER starts with the Outputs a person actually produces, breaks each one into the Verbs behind it, Evaluates each verb as AI-first, human-first, or hybrid, and Routes it to the right kind of tool. The person doing the work is the best-placed person to run every one of those steps.
It also builds the daily habit Charter keeps pointing to. When AI is part of a workflow that runs every week, the AI step happens every time the work does.
My colleague Phil Kirschner, a Transformation Partner at Lead with AI, added a useful layer in his recent piece, Get Out of Your Swimlane. Most process maps start from the org chart, with one horizontal lane per team, and AI now moves work between lanes faster than anyone can redraw them.
Phil's answer is to map the work first and attach the "who" last, as a label you fully expect to change when an agent or automation takes over a step. As he puts it, "Swimlanes draw lines around people and organizations, but better maps draw lines between steps."
That shift matters for agency. A redesign that starts from the work invites the people who do it into the room. A redesign that starts from the org chart tends to open with the question everyone is quietly worried about, which is whose lane is getting smaller.
