Plenty of New Zealanders are already leaning on artificial intelligence to get through their working day. They just do not want their boss, or their workmates, to know about it.
New research released this week paints a picture of a workforce quietly using tools like ChatGPT while wrestling with a nagging sense that it is somehow cheating. The AI Paradox at Work report, produced by workplace software company Employment Hero, found that 37 percent of Kiwi workers feel guilty about using AI even though they accept it helps them produce better work and pick up useful new skills.
The guilt runs deeper than that. Some 38 percent said using AI to complete parts of their job feels like cheating, and 42 percent worried that heavy use of the technology made them look replaceable. Nearly a third, 32 percent, admitted to presenting AI-generated work as entirely their own, while 28 percent said they were using AI tools without their employer even knowing.
The report was based on responses from 1,076 people, made up of 256 business owners and leaders and 820 employees, across New Zealand businesses with between five and 1,500 staff. The fieldwork was carried out between late April and early May this year by research firm Focaldata.
What emerges is a strange contradiction. Workers can see the value of the technology, with 57 percent saying it helps them develop valuable skills, yet many are hiding how much they rely on it and teaching themselves on the quiet. More than half, 51 percent, said they had picked up their AI skills from YouTube and TikTok rather than through any formal training at work.
Employment Hero’s general manager for New Zealand, Neil Webster, said the people most comfortable with the technology were often the ones most torn about using it. Speaking to RNZ, he said the most capable users carried the most doubt.
“Workers with the most AI competence are the most conflicted,” Webster said. “They know what it can do for them, but are anxious about the impact it might have on their role and their livelihood.”
That anxiety shows up in the numbers. Among the workers rated as highly competent with AI, 41 percent said they felt replaceable, and 29 percent reported that their sense of job security had dropped because of the technology they had become good at using.
Webster argued that much of the unease comes from a lack of clear direction from the top. Many workplaces, he said, simply have not decided what good AI use looks like, leaving staff to work it out alone and often in secret.
“Many businesses are still working out what AI should look like in their workplace which is understandable because it is evolving quickly and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach,” he said.
The research also suggests New Zealand is moving more slowly than comparable countries. Just 34 percent of Kiwi employers said AI was driving innovation in their business, well behind the 55 percent recorded in the United Kingdom and 45 percent in Australia. Only 15 percent of New Zealand businesses described AI as core to how they operate, compared with 24 percent in the United Kingdom.
Dr Guy Bate, who leads work on artificial intelligence at the University of Auckland, said the gap between how often people use AI and how confident they feel about using it well is a big part of the problem.
“The adoption of AI may be rising faster than the confidence in what ‘good’ AI use looks like,” Bate said.
His point lands close to the heart of the report. When there are no shared rules and no agreed idea of what counts as fair use, workers are left to make their own private judgements. For a lot of them, the safest option has been to keep quiet, do the work, and let colleagues assume it was all their own effort.
Webster said the answer was not to police the technology but to bring it into the open and treat it as a way of lifting what people can do rather than replacing them.
“AI’s greatest value is increasing human capability by making things possible that were previously too difficult or costly,” he said.
There are early signs that employers expect the shape of work to change rather than simply shrink. Around half of the business leaders surveyed, 50 percent, said they expected existing roles to be refocused because of AI, while 18 percent expected the technology to create entirely new jobs. That is a long way from the wholesale replacement that many anxious workers fear, though it offers little comfort to someone worried their particular task is the one being automated.
For now, the picture is of a workforce caught in the middle. New Zealanders are curious enough to teach themselves on nights and weekends, capable enough to fold AI into their daily work, and uneasy enough to keep the whole thing hidden. Until businesses give their staff a clear and honest steer on what good use looks like, that quiet guilt is likely to stick around.
You can read more coverage of the findings at the NZ Herald.
Are you quietly using AI to get your work done, and does it feel like cheating or just common sense? Share your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply