Love it. Hate it. But accept it. Artificial intelligence (AI) is with us for the long haul.
So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the polarizing technology has a day of its own. Yes, Wednesday is AI Appreciation Day, the latest entry in the cultural lingua franca.
In a world where nearly everything gets its own day — Quitters Day is Jan. 9 and Sock Monkey Day is March 7 — AI’s day makes sense if only for its sheer impact and import in every corner of American life. For now, the technology serves as sort of a national Rorschach Test of reactions, from savior for business and productivity to potential joblessness. Some refer to July 16 as AI Dread Day.
Most people are in the middle, reluctantly open to AI’s vast potential (and downsides).
“I’m 100% neutral. Why didn’t we have cell phone appreciation day or Google Sheets day, etc.?” says Melisa Bleasdale, a vice president of analyst relations in the San Francisco Bay Area. “I think it feels like noise or forced acceptance.”
Businesses may swoon over AI, but most consumers are holding it at arm’s length, questioning its ability to solve complex issues, its robotic tone, and the sense that it’s all about cutting costs, not improving the user experience. Resistance to AI-only customer service, for instance, runs deep: 93% of consumers prefer talking to a human and 81% insist AI support is a cynical cost-cutting move, according to a national survey from Kinsta.
“There is a full spectrum of reactions. But when it comes to customer support, people want to talk to people,” Roger Williams, a community manager at Kinsta, said in an interview. “The AI companies are selling us on convenience and saving money, but the reality will be more of a gray area.”
As AI agents and generative AI gain traction, autonomous workers and assistants are inevitable. “AI has completely changed how businesses operate. It streamlines processes and helps teams make smarter decisions, leading to better outcomes for customers,” says Laura Ellis, vice president of data and AI at Rapid7. “It is now our responsibility to use this technology with intention, keeping it human-centric, transparent, and ethical, so it can continue to drive meaningful impact.”
Techstrong Group heard from more than 30 tech executives who shared their thoughts on AI’s special day, and several recurring themes, sentiments, and fears cropped up during phone and email interviews: Curiosity in what AI agents can do for productivity, counteracted by worries over data security, compliance, and privacy risks.
Bottom line, however, the overriding financial promise of AI — NVIDIA Corp. briefly became the first company to pass $4 trillion in market value, with Microsoft Corp. close behind — continues to win the day.
“What once seemed like science fiction is now the pulse of progress. AI no longer just analyzes data; it reasons, predicts, and adapts. It collaborates with humans, augments our creativity, and even safeguards our digital and physical environments,” said Ezzeldin Hussein, senior director of solutions engineering at SentinelOne. “In cybersecurity, for instance, AI has shifted the balance — empowering defenders with predictive insights and autonomous threat response.
“Yet this is only the beginning,” he added. “The next frontier lies in ethical, responsible AI — where transparency, fairness, and human oversight are embedded into every algorithm. We are stepping into an era where AI becomes not just a tool, but a trusted partner.”
Agentic AI has dominated the news and product cycles of tech throughout 2025. Dozens of companies have dived into creating autonomous workers to perform lower-level tasks in what many consider the first major enterprise opportunity (of many) to monetize AI technology while increasing productivity and shaving costs.
AI agents are an integral part of how software is built, working alongside engineers to “pave the way for an AI-embedded future,” said Srini Tallapragada, president and chief engineering and customer success officer at Salesforce Inc., a progenitor of AI agents as part of the digital workforce.
This, quite naturally, has spurred chatter over job displacement and the inevitable day when chatbots and robotics tell humans what to do at work.
OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap told the New York Times that those who might be most vulnerable are not new hires, but longer-tenured staff who struggle to adapt to modern tools. Lightcap noted that while some fear AI will shrink engineering teams, many businesses are now asking for more developers, not fewer.
Economists and other experts are split over the importance of tenure. In computer-related fields, employment for those with less than two years of experience peaked in 2023 but is down 20% to 25% since then, based on data from ADP. There is a similar pattern among customer service reps.
Employment for those with more than two years of experience increased in the same time period.
On the flip side, an MIT economist, Danielle Li, said AI could undermine higher-skilled workers more than entry-level workers in fields like engineering to write code or an attorney to write a legal brief. “The state of the world is not good for experienced workers… AI allows the skill to live outside of people,” she told the New York Times.
AI’s Seismic Advances For Working
Central to the debate will be the role of AI agents, digitally created autonomous workers that will be created by the hundreds of millions to fulfill specific tasks deemed too repetitive and rote for humans. While the tech industry celebrates an emerging digital workforce, the rank-and-file sniff competition for their jobs and livelihood.
“Over the last year AI has enabled me to build and test ideas in minutes instead of the months it took in previous years. That’s reason enough to appreciate AI, but even more impactful and impressive to me is the humanity that AI has emulated,” says Charles Herring, CEO and co-founder of Witfoo.
Nearly three in four employees (72%) expect their organization’s budget for AI tools to increase and more than half use them daily, based on interviews with about 2,200 IT and business professionals in Quickbase’s third annual Gray Work Report.
Conversely, a staggering 89% are concerned about data security, compliance or privacy risks associated with AI.
“The emergence of Agentic AI – AI systems that make independent decisions – has resulted in an explosion of machine identities across the enterprise,” Pierre Mouallem, chief information security officer at Delinea, said in an email. “Our recent research found that for every human identity, there are now 46 machine identities. That’s a staggering expansion of the attack surface in a very short time. This scale brings a new wave of security challenges.”
Syed Zaeem Hosain, founder and chief evangelist at Aeris, warns in high-stakes environments such as healthcare or critical infrastructure, there must be thoughtful guardrails. “Not every decision should be left to automation,” he said. “Human oversight remains vital where safety is on the line.”
The Security Nexus
Conversely, cyberattacks are quicker and more sophisticated because of AI, enabling the bad guys to find and exploit vulnerabilities in quick succession. This essentially means AI has made falling victim to a digital intrusion all but inevitable, warns Geoff Burke, senior technology adviser at Object First.
But like almost everything it touches, AI brings the good with the bad.
“Security teams use stacks that generate thousands of signals a minute across dozens of tools. It’s no longer possible to define every relationship between those signals with rules alone,” said Jimmy Mesta, co-founder and chief technology officer at RAD Security. “AI is now actually the only way teams can keep up. Instead of using clumsy rules that keep breaking, AI can spot patterns, connect events across multiple parts of the security stack, and take action fast enough to matter.”
Ultimately, AI is quickly morphing into a balancing act that both entices and enrages as it celebrates its day. For every seeming benefit, there is calculated risk, industry experts say.
“AI shouldn’t create distance; it should remove friction so people can connect more meaningfully when it counts. Building AI that understands context, respects emotion, and knows when to step back so humans can step in is key,” Swapnil Jain, CEO of Observe.AI, said in an email. “When done right, AI doesn’t just make things faster. It makes them better.”
“Organizations that strike the right balance between innovation and responsibility will set the best examples of how AI can be a team’s most powerful ally,” says Mike Szilagyi, senior vice president and general manager of product management at Genesys.
