How AI Use at Work Could Quietly Stall Your Career Growth
A Columbia Business School professor warns that misusing AI on the job can breed complacency and make workers less distinctive over time.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the modern workplace at a remarkable pace, but a leading academic is sounding a cautionary note about how workers engage with the technology on a day-to-day basis. Sandra Matz, a professor at Columbia Business School, argues that leaning on AI in the wrong ways can quietly erode the qualities that make professionals stand out — leaving them, in her framing, increasingly "boring" to employers and colleagues alike.
The core concern is one of gradual atrophy rather than sudden displacement. When workers offload too much cognitive or creative effort to AI tools, they risk losing the habits of deep thinking, original problem-solving, and nuanced judgment that define high-value contributors. Matz describes this dynamic as "gradually falling behind and becoming complacent" — a slow-moving career risk that may not register until real damage is done.
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What makes this warning particularly relevant is the way it reframes a dominant narrative. Much of the public anxiety around AI has focused on outright job loss — machines replacing humans wholesale. Matz's analysis points to a subtler and, in some ways, more insidious threat: workers who remain employed but become progressively less capable and less competitive because they have outsourced too much of their intellectual work to automated systems.
The implication for professionals is a need to think strategically about which tasks AI should handle and which ones should remain firmly in human hands. Using AI to eliminate tedious, repetitive work can free up mental bandwidth for higher-order thinking. But using it as a substitute for that higher-order thinking itself may represent a long-term trade-off that workers will come to regret — sacrificing skill development for short-term convenience.
As AI tools become standard fixtures in virtually every industry, the workers who thrive are likely to be those who treat the technology as an amplifier of their own capabilities rather than a replacement for them. Continue reading at US Top News and Analysis.
