Why Employee Trust Could Determine Automation ROI

Automation has always been a double-edged sword in the workplace since the invention of the first industrial machines and assembly lines.

On one hand, it can replace humans in dangerous or difficult tasks and overall improve total productivity, which in turn creates prosperity for the whole economic system.

On the other hand, it can displace workers and create unemployment, or empower capital over labor.

So it is no surprise that workers mostly accept and embrace automation when it empowers them, but often view it skeptically when they feel employers are using it to get rid of them.

For a long time, automation was confined to factories and assembly lines, or to simple, tedious tasks, for example, processing data in Excel sheets. This is changing quickly, with the double force of AI and robotics bringing an increasing level of automation to all jobs, blue- and white-collar, entry-level or requiring deep expertise.

So to successfully integrate these new forms of automation, companies and other organizations will need to carefully negotiate and convince their existing workforce that these technical capabilities will convert into sustained human productivity.

A new study by researchers at Chitkara University (India) and Sunway University (Malaysia) investigates the human factors that contribute to automation success and return on investment. They found that employees’ trust that automation improves rather than replaces their jobs is one of the several key factors in successful deployment of automation.

It was published in The Bottom Line¹, under the title “Workplace robot adoption and its impact on employee perception of job (in)security, engagement and performance”.

The Fear Of Being Replaceable

Task automation frees employees from routine chores, but also triggers anxiety about redundancy, especially in skill-intensive sectors where work identities are tightly bound to expertise. The perception of job insecurity depresses motivation, weakens engagement, and erodes performance.

This is a situation that will be especially acute in tech-driven organizations in the service industry, especially in emerging economies that are competing on “good enough” service and on price, with India a good example.

What makes it complicated is that automation augments some roles while eroding others. But it is not always clear which roles will be affected. So it’s reasonable for many employees to have a forward-looking stress response, rooted in uncertainty about future employability.

Several studies showed steeper productivity declines when workers believe that machines will replace rather than complement them.

Overall, automated code testing, overnight data cleaning, and real-time infrastructure monitoring remove much of the labor from daily work, allowing professionals to channel effort toward architecture design, client problem solving, and innovation.

So in general, automation is expected to favor a shift from repetitive, rule-based operations and routine tasks to tasks that demand analysis, creativity, and judgment.

Analyzing Automation & Labor Data

Asking Real Workers

The researchers assessed perceptions about automation through a questionnaire targeting Indian IT service professionals who work with, or alongside, process automation. This led to 398 usable answers.

The data captured demographic background (age, education, gender, work city, and work experience), with most participants younger than 40 years (88%), three-fifths holding a postgraduate degree (61.1%), and 59.8% male. Respondents were spread across five IT hubs in India: Bangalore (23.9%), Chennai (17.1%), Delhi (19.8%), Hyderabad (20.6%), and Pune (18.6%).

Source: The Bottom Line

They used a five-point scale to measure multiple metrics, as well as the correlation between each of them:

• Adoption of automation/robot in the workplace.
• Employee perceptions of job (in)security.
• Employee engagement.
• Employee performance.

Source: The Bottom Line

Automation Effects

The researchers analyzed both the direct relationship between automation and performance and the indirect pathways involving job security and engagement. The direct effect of adoption of robots at the workplace on employee performance was strong, indicating that workplace robots can improve employee performance.

The aggregate indirect effect showed that alleviating the fear of job loss when robots are adopted at the workplace contributes to better performance among employees.

Automation also had a separate positive pathway through employee engagement. More importantly, the researchers found a sequential pathway in which automation influenced perceived job security, which affected engagement and, ultimately, employee performance

This reveals the existence of a serial mediation pathway: adoption of robots at the workplace → employee perception of job security → improved employee engagement → rising employee performance.

Conversely, the results suggest that perceived job insecurity can weaken engagement and partially offset the performance gains associated with automation

This is in line with major psychological theory, notably Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: basic security, including job security/employment, must be satisfied before higher‐order motivations like engagement can flourish.

Source: Simple Psychology

The researchers also note that this effect is expected to be stronger in hierarchical or risk-averse cultures, as illustrated in India and its IT services industry.

Investors Takeaways

An important piece of information in this study is not that automation can improve productivity, which is rather expected and the whole point of it. It is that the magnitude of the total indirect effect can massively change the scale of the productivity improvement brought by automation.

This is not only an important fact, but a metric you can measure, monitor, and regularly check.

So the strongest automation platforms may not simply replace tasks. Instead, they will orchestrate software robots, AI agents, and employees while giving enterprises the governance, visibility, and retraining pathways needed to deploy automation without undermining workforce performance.

“When taken collectively, these results illustrate that the productivity potential of workplace robots depends not only on mechanical efficiency but also on addressing employees’ psychological responses.”

Only with such a holistic approach, taking into account human psychology, will it be able to fully accomplish the promised productivity gains without undermining the preexisting workforce performance.

The way to achieve it, according to the researchers, passes by a few key decisions and policies:

• Giving clear security signals, for example, an organization that spells out “no compulsory layoffs during the first eighteen months of automation”.
• Adding structured reskilling to reassure: certification programs, especially with joint design of these programs, where employees help identify skill gaps, reinforce shared ownership.
• Recrafting roles to highlight human problem-solving. Revised job descriptions should spell out how robotic support frees employees for architecture reviews, client consulting, or prototype design.
• Measuring engagement continuously to flag slipping morale before performance metrics deteriorate.

Investing In Automation

UiPath

Many companies have been built on creating and optimizing the previous generation of automation software at scale. These companies are well positioned to deploy the latest AI agents across their customer networks, which have trusted them for automation.

One such company is UiPath (PATH ), a long-established leader in enterprise automation founded in 2005. The central niche of the company is enterprise business customers, with the “Robotic Process Automation” category (RPA).

While today UiPath is not limited to RPA, this is in itself a large market and poised for explosive growth: it was worth $4.68B in 2025 and is expected to grow at a 29% CAGR to $35.84B in 2033.

Source: GrandView Research

UiPath’s products create an automatically auditable dataset that reduces compliance costs, which has contributed greatly to UiPath’s commercial success in highly regulated sectors like banking, manufacturing, and government.

With the recent acquisition of WorkFusion in 2026, a pioneer in AI agents for financial crime compliance, UiPath is further cementing this key contribution in compliance.

The company is also moving quickly with AI, as UiPath was already embracing the ancestors of modern LLMs and other AI systems through acquisitions in 2022.

An important factor in helping AI adoption and enterprise trust in UiPath over other potential AI providers is the UiPath AI Trust Layer. It provides centralized management for LLM usage, ensuring zero third-party training on customer data, an important factor when enterprise customers would take business and legal risks if any data were leaked by the AI models.

Source: UiPath

The company is now moving toward a multi-agent workflow, using several AI agents that can plan and adapt independently, while collaborating with each other. They are integrated into the UiPath Maestro platform, which “unifies AI agents, traditional RPA robots, and human workflows into end-to-end business processes”.

UiPath’s recent results indicate that enterprise demand continues to grow as the company makes this transition. For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, UiPath reported revenue of $418 million, up 17% year over year, while annualized renewal run-rate reached $1.901 billion, up 12%. The company also reported its first profitable quarter under generally accepted accounting principles, along with $130 million in adjusted free cash flow. These figures suggest that UiPath is entering the agentic automation market from an established and increasingly profitable enterprise software business rather than attempting to build adoption from scratch.

Investors can be reassured that the company has been highly reactive to the mounting competitive pressure from new AI technologies. The experience of UiPath in automating business processes without disconnecting the human workforce, nor increasing regulatory risks, will be essential for the next step in automation deployment.

(You can read more about UiPath’s history and products in our investment report dedicated to the company)

Latest UiPath (PATH) Stock News and Developments

Study Referenced

^{1. Arun Aggarwal, Ishani Sharma, and Weng Marc Lim. Workplace robot adoption and its impact on employee perception of job (in)security, engagement, and performance. The Bottom Line. February 03, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1108/BL-11-2024-0198}