You can probably now add AI training to the list of required work videos you aren’t allowed to fast-forward through. Buuut, maybe there aren’t even enough companies requiring AI instruction to skip.

According to a recent survey from OwlLabs and Pulse, almost 70% of companies have added AI tools to their workflows, but just 38% are actually training their employees how to use it.

Companies without AI training risk investing in a tool no one uses (or uses poorly), creating a workforce that falls behind the competition. An improperly trained workforce also risks misuse of AI tools and consequently organizational security issues.

“People in positions of power tend to roll this out thinking everybody will just start using it. But that’s simply not what happens,” Conor Grennan, chief AI architect at NYU‘s Stern School of Business and CEO of AI training consultancy AI Mindset, said.

But before signing everyone up, CFOs should understand that AI training isn’t just about teaching humans how to use a new tool, it’s about training them to think differently, to identify biases, and to change behaviors, according to Grennan.

“People in finance tend to want to have a new tool,” he said. “But this is not a new tool. This is a new way of thinking and working.”

How should finance be thinking about AI training?—JK

Tax season this year went…surprisingly well, all things considered. Even though the IRS lost thousands of personnel and went through a revolving door of commissioners, 2025 still had “one of the most successful filing seasons in recent memory,” National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins wrote in her recent midyear report to Congress. The IRS processed more than 98% of individual tax returns, and achieved an 87% Level of Service on its phone lines, up from 63% last season. Heck, even CPAs said things went well overall.

So the agency’s out of the woods, right?

Not exactly. The IRS stands to lose around 26% of its workforce this year, Collins wrote, going from around 102,000 employees to less than 76,000. The full impact of the job cuts has yet to be felt, as many departing employees took deferred resignations and won’t leave until September. And the IRS is set to lose around 20% of its appropriated funding from Congress, which, coupled with decreased IRA funding, means a 37% budget cut altogether, Collins wrote.

On top of this, the new budget bill just passed—and the IRS typically receives a higher volume of calls in years with tax law changes.

Collins recommends the IRS hire “essential filing season employees” such as customer service representatives and processing personnel by the end of this summer so they can be trained in time for busy season ’26. “Especially in the short term,” she wrote, “the number of total IRS employees is less important than the number of trained employees.”

Click here for more on the challenges the IRS is facing in 2026.—CV

Here’s another acronym to add to your vocabulary: VUCA. It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and it is just as dramatic as it sounds.

A pair of economists coined the term “VUCA” in the late ’80s, and the US Army War College picked up on it in the early ’90s to describe how the US was faring in the post-Cold War environment. New research suggests the country is in a similar era of volatility, and it’s impacting the workforce. Some 42% of employees say their stress is induced by fear and uncertainty in the world, and 68% report a dip in productivity, according to a report from people analytics software company meQ.

“It’s been like stacking more stuff on the worry list…It’s just the idea that we aren’t sure what’s going to happen. Are we going to have a war? Are we not? Are we going to have tariffs or are we going to not have tariffs?” Brad Smith, chief science officer at meQ, said. “All of these things really feed a pretty strong degree of uncertainty, and that feeds stress.”

A VUCA world. People teams need to be aware of how this moment of uncertainty and volatility is impacting how employees show up to work, Smith said.

Keep reading HR Brew’s story on helping employees through tough times here.—MC