Workers using AI at their jobs have quietly figured out something. Telling their boss about it is often a bad idea.
Thomas Prommer, an engineering executive at Adidas, saw this play out on his own team. When the company started asking engineers to attribute their AI use on projects, Prommer says, they mostly stopped using AI altogether. Nobody wanted their best work stamped with a footnote suggesting a chatbot did the real thinking.
That reaction is showing up in many workplaces. Christoph Riedl, a Northeastern University professor who researches this, puts it plainly: when a worker discloses AI use without spelling out exactly how they used it, managers tend to assume the worst. The default read is that the human contributed less, not more.
So workers have adjusted. According to Glean's Work AI Index 2026, which surveyed digital workers across a range of companies:
- 32% actively hide their AI use from their manager.
- 33% downplay how much AI helped them on a task.
- 33% exaggerate their AI skills when it's useful to do so.
Even the workers Glean identifies as top AI performers do this. About 38% of them downplay AI's role in their work, and 36% hide it entirely. These are the people getting the most out of the technology, and they've decided being upfront is a losing move.
They might be right. Glean's survey also found that 69% of AI users have shipped work they didn't fully understand, couldn't confidently defend, or knew wasn't quite right. Around one in eight admit to sending out AI output they believe is wrong. When that's what your average coworker is doing, managers have a reason to be suspicious of anyone who volunteers that AI helped.
The problem also runs in the opposite direction. Some companies have started measuring AI adoption, and workers immediately learned to game it. Amazon scrapped an internal AI usage leaderboard earlier this year after engineers admitted to "tokenmaxxing," which is asking their coding assistants pointless questions purely to run up their numbers. One anonymous engineer described it as self-defense against being labeled someone who "uses too little AI."
Sarah Hoffman, an AI researcher, summed it up on LinkedIn after the story broke: the one area where humans still reliably beat AI is gaming the system. Number of AI tokens consumed is not a business outcome.
The productivity data captures the mess neatly. Glean found that 87% of workers use AI and 75% say it makes them personally more productive. Only 13% say their organization is actually performing significantly better because of it. All the individual gains are getting lost somewhere between the worker and the company.
Companies keep telling employees to use more AI and be more transparent about how they use it, without noticing that those two asks pull in opposite directions. Until managers can distinguish "used AI well" from "let AI do the work," the rational move for a lot of employees is going to be exactly what they're already doing: use it constantly, mention it as little as possible, and hope nobody looks too closely. That's not a problem AI created. It's one that clumsy measurement is quietly making worse.
