AI was supposed to make workers more capable. For some, it’s doing the opposite.
Some young workers think that overreliance has crossed a critical turning point: 40% say they can’t get by without the technology. GoTo CEO Rich Veldran told Fortune an overreliance on AI poses a sticky dilemma, especially for younger workers looking to learn the ropes.
“It’s only in the rearview mirror that folks will look back and say, ‘You know what, I’m actually relying on it too much. Perhaps I’m not learning some of the things I need to learn,’” he said.
“Use AI to take work out of the system because it does a tremendous job of that,” Veldran said. “Don’t cede to it all human judgment.”
“There’s also the fear of if you depend too much on [AI] what you’re doing isn’t as valuable,” he said, “if what you’re really doing is just extracting answers from AI and not adding a lot of other personal value. Anybody can do that.”
“The super-users we surveyed were around 3x more likely to have received both a promotion and pay raise in the past year, compared to employees who have been slow to adopt these tools,” Dan Schawbel, managing partner at Workplace Intelligence, said in a statement.
That leaves Gen Z in a tough spot: either adopt the technology and risk growing dependent on it, or resist it and get left behind.
Veldran framed it as a generational reckoning. “You haven’t had those experiences necessarily where you’re formulating a strategy, you had to do the work yourself, you had to earn your stripes,” he said. “You learn from those experiences and that gives you confidence as you move up the chain.”
