Faster work isn’t always smarter work.
Artificial intelligence promised to make workers smarter, faster, and more productive. It is delivering on the speed — saving the average employee 2.3 hours a day — but a troubling side effect is emerging: AI may be making workers less capable.
Instead of elevating human potential, unguided AI adoption is creating a crisis of skill erosion and overreliance, particularly among the next generation of leaders.
According to GoTo’s 2026 Pulse of Work report, a global study of 2,500 employees and IT decision-makers conducted in partnership with Workplace Intelligence, 50 percent of all workers admit they rely too much on AI. Even more alarming: 39 percent of employees say relying on AI is actively eroding their skills and making them less intelligent.
The Gen Z AI paradox
This paradox hits early-career talent the hardest. While 93 percent of Gen Z workers acknowledge that AI has improved their daily work, 62 percent admit they rely too heavily on these tools. Another 40 percent feel they can no longer function without them.
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The long-term psychological and operational toll is mounting fast:
- Skill Erosion: 46 percent of Gen Z report that over-relying on AI is eroding their foundational skills and making them feel less intelligent.
- Career Anxiety: 50 percent of Gen Z believe their current AI dependency will hurt their long-term career prospects.
- Rising “Workslop”: 43 percent of workers admit to using AI outputs despite suspecting they contained errors or low-quality information. Consequently, 77 percent of employees say reviewing AI-generated work takes more time than reviewing human work.
When employees feel forced to use AI to hit unrealistic productivity quotas without guardrails, they stop exercising critical thinking. Nearly 70 percent of employees admit to using AI improperly for high stakes tasks like legal compliance, sensitive personnel actions, or strategic decision-making. Already, one in four IT leaders reports that AI mistakes have directly damaged customer relationships or impacted their company’s bottom line.
The leadership gap
The issue is not technology. It is the complete lack of organizational governance. Fewer than half of companies currently have an official AI policy in place, and 80 percent of employees say they have received zero formal training on how to use AI tools properly for their specific role.
Source: www.inc.com
