36 Percent of AI Workers Lie to Their Bosses — Here’s the 1911 Reason Why

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(SeaPRwire) –   By: Lucas Caldwell

Think about the last time you finished something faster than expected at work. Your boss praised the report. You took an hour instead of an afternoon. Did you tell anyone why? The awkward silence that follows isn’t incompetence. It’s a survival reflex. The worker who used AI to turn a four-hour task into an hour doesn’t feel like a hero. They feel exposed. The same tool that makes you look brilliant also makes you look dispensable. Nobody sits you down and explains that trade-off. And no manager briefing on AI benefits closes the gap between feeling productive and fearing redundancy.

Glean surveyed 6,000 computer-based workers across the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. The question wasn’t about whether AI works. It already does. Those who said AI helped them get more done and produce better work split sharply on disclosure. Thirty-six percent admitted they hid how much the tool helped them. A 2024 joint Microsoft and LinkedIn survey found the same pattern. More than half of AI users at work worried that using it on important tasks would make them look replaceable. The data isn’t about adoption rates. It’s about trust collapse between worker and employer.

Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote about this exact trap in 1911. He called it “soldiering.” Workers on piece-rate pay found ways to make more units, then employers cut the per-unit rate. Workers had to produce more to earn what they earned before. Taylor himself admitted telling his own shop workers that in their position, he would resist too. Now managers ask employees to demonstrate AI shortcuts. The manager sees team learning. The employee sees a roadmap to headcount reduction. Applause doesn’t fill that gap. Neither does a Slack channel thread full of congratulations.

Norway signed something most American companies don’t have access to. On October 2, the government partnered with eight employer and union organizations on an AI agreement running through 2029. It commits to employee involvement when AI is introduced and requires that gains benefit workers alongside businesses and society. That framework traces to Kristen Nygaard’s work with the Iron and Metal Workers’ Union. In the early 1970s, that collaboration birthed participatory design. But Norway’s 52.6 percent union membership makes this enforceable. In the United States, 10 percent of workers belong to a union. In the private sector alone, it drops to 5.9 percent. The gap isn’t ideological. It’s structural.

A US employer can copy the conversation but not the enforcement. The real test isn’t whether companies invite feedback. It’s whether that feedback has teeth. The Norway model at least has structural backing. The American equivalent needs a different mechanism. What might work is something simple and binding. A company could promise no pay cuts or job losses from AI-driven time savings for a defined period. Employees help decide how saved time gets used. Managers discuss results before raising targets. The promise needs to be written down. It needs a dispute mechanism. It won’t stop a company from eventually restructuring. But it gives someone a reason to show their shortcut today instead of hiding it.

Every efficiency gain stays locked inside someone’s private workflow right now because the technology is proven but the incentive structure simply isn’t, and companies aren’t fixing that structure — they’re just waiting for the hiding to end, and it won’t end on its own because no AI workshop or productivity dashboard changes the real calculus here, since the question has been the same since 1911: does the person who saves time get rewarded or replaced, and nobody will show their shortcut until that answer is clear, which means every company runs on ghost productivity that nobody can audit or build on.

Author bio: Lucas Caldwell, a tech opinion leader with millions of followers on X/Twitter, known for cutting through corporate AI narratives with data-driven, no-nonsense analysis of workplace technology trends and labor dynamics.