AI at Work May Stunt Career Growth, Experts Warn

Already 43% of workers in the United States report using artificial intelligence in their jobs, according to a study published in March by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — but researchers and academics say the technology carries real professional risks that many employees are not equipped to navigate.

Sandra Matz, a professor at Columbia Business School, has studied the effects of workplace AI adoption and identified two direct consequences for workers who lean too heavily on the tools: stagnation and mediocrity.

"When employees use it to outsource critical thinking or creative reasoning, there's a real risk of gradually falling behind and becoming complacent," Matz said. One driver of that risk, she noted, is that many AI systems are designed to produce the most obvious and safe outputs. "In short, we become just like everyone else," she said.

Fred Oswald, an industrial-organizational psychologist and a former member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, said the challenge is that professionals often struggle to distinguish between beneficial and harmful applications of the technology. "There is a Wild West of AI use that's worth understanding and exploring, so that employees and organizations can manage risks and further benefit," Oswald said.

Matz acknowledged that AI can be useful for automating repetitive tasks and serving as a brainstorming partner. The concern, she said, arises when it displaces original thought. "The moment all employees start consulting AI when developing their ideas, independent thinking begins to give way to algorithmic consensus," she said.

Americus Reed II, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business, said colleagues have taken to calling that dynamic "cognitive surrender." Reed described a clearer model for appropriate use: AI should handle summarizing information, analyzing data, and organizing ideas, rather than reasoning itself. "It should remove friction, not replace judgment," he said. "The goal is to spend less time processing information and more time creating meaning."

Dorothy Leidner, a business and ethics professor at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia, said younger workers face a heightened version of the risk, because they lack the accumulated expertise that would allow them to use AI as a supplement rather than a substitute. "The risk is higher for younger workers who do not have a deep expertise to help them use AI as a thought enhancer rather than a thought generator," Leidner said.

The concern extends beyond individual output and into workplace relationships. Matz warned that using AI to draft messages to colleagues "will gradually erode trust," arguing that informal communication should remain organic. "The moment we suspect that a message has been outsourced to AI, we might start to question whether our colleagues care enough to write to us themselves," she said.

Leidner raised a related concern about the proliferation of AI-generated correspondence more broadly. "If we get to the point where AI is generating the emails and AI is responding to the emails, then there is no actual communication taking place," she said.

Eva Selenko, a work psychology professor at Loughborough University in England, focused on a different dimension of the problem — professional identity. She said she is most worried about workers deploying AI on tasks "core to one's self-understanding as a professional." "Witnessing a tool outperforming you on a central task of your expertise can be a status threat," Selenko said. "If these opportunities are taken away, your self-concept gets a bit more shaky."

Reed acknowledged that such experiences may become unavoidable as AI capabilities improve, but argued the response should not be avoidance. "Workers must remember that adopting AI is not the same as outsourcing your identity," he said. "Technology changes quickly, but the uniquely human skills — judgment, creativity, curiosity and relationships — become even more valuable."

As adoption rates continue to climb, how organizations set norms around AI use — and how clearly they communicate those norms — will likely determine whether the technology functions as a productivity multiplier or a professional liability for their workforces.

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