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Imagine your boss praising a report you finished with AI. A job that once took an afternoon was done in an hour. You checked the result, and it was good.
Do you mention the AI?
Tell your boss, and you might become the person everyone turns to for help with the new technology. Better assignments could follow, perhaps a pay rise or promotion. Keep quiet, and you can enjoy being seen as unusually good at your job.
But there is another possibility. Your boss looks at what you have done and wonders whether a team of three could become a team of one. Suddenly, the discovery that made you feel brilliant also makes you nervous. And silence offers no guarantee: a colleague might find a way to automate part of your job first.
That is the panic. It is not that people cannot use the tool. It is that showing how much faster they are may be how the job gets smaller. The worry reaches people who know exactly how to use AI, because the question is not how it works but what happens after it does. No explanation of the technology can answer that.
Glean, a workplace AI company, surveyed 6,000 people who mostly work on computers in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Some said AI helped them get more done and produce better work. Of those workers, 36% said they hid how much it helped them.
The fear of looking replaceable also appears in a 2024 Microsoft and LinkedIn survey. More than half of people using AI at work worried that using it on important tasks would create exactly that impression.
Workers have faced this bargain before
More than a century ago, factory managers faced a similar problem. Workers were holding back because they did not want the boss to discover how much they could produce.
Frederick Winslow Taylor described this in his 1911 book on scientific management. Some workers were paid for each item they made. If they found a way to make more, employers could cut the payment per item. The workers would then have to produce more just to earn what they had earned before.
Deliberately slowing down was known as “soldiering.” Taylor wanted to stop it, yet recalled telling workers in his machine shop that, in their position, he would resist producing more too.
Now imagine a manager asking everyone to demonstrate their best AI shortcuts. From the manager’s side, it is a chance for the team to learn. From an employee’s side, it may feel like being asked to explain how the company could manage with fewer people. A round of applause does not settle that worry.
I lead a Norwegian research center, and I use AI to work through budgets and draft meeting minutes. The hours it gives back are exactly what a later budget review can take away.
A colleague who uses the same shortcut to get home on time has the same problem. If the reward for sharing it is always another assignment, the relief disappears.
Give workers a reason to share
On October 2, Norway’s government and eight employer and union organizations signed an AI agreement running through 2029. It calls for employees to be involved when AI is introduced, using existing rights, and for the gains to benefit workers as well as businesses and society.
There is a history behind that approach. In the early 1970s, computer scientist Kristen Nygaard worked with Norway’s Iron and Metal Workers’ Union on the introduction of computers. Their project helped establish participatory design: involving the people who will use a system in decisions about it.
The new agreement is a statement of intent. It does not guarantee anyone a pay rise or a share of the savings. Whether it changes what happens at work remains to be seen. It also rests on something most American workplaces lack. In 2025, 52.6% of Norwegian employees belonged to a union, against 10% of American workers and 5.9% in the U.S. private sector.
A U.S. employer can copy the conversation, not the enforcement. The practical question is straightforward. Do employees get a say in what AI means for their jobs, or are they asked for feedback after the decision has been made?
Consider a different invitation to share those AI shortcuts. For a six-month trial, the company promises that participants will not lose pay or jobs because of the trial. Employees help decide how any time saved will be used, and managers agree to discuss the results with them before raising targets.
Workers might choose paid training or time to clear a backlog that has kept them working late. The company might want to take on more business. The point is to have that conversation before the savings have already been committed elsewhere.
Such a promise needs to be written down, with a way for employees to challenge a broken commitment. It will not bind a company that later decides the saving is a smaller team. It can give people a reason to share what they have learned today.
Taylor offered higher pay to workers who met management’s targets. Today’s employers also need an answer for the person who finds a faster way to work.
That employee may already have a demonstration ready. Whether the boss gets to see it depends partly on what happened to the last person who saved the company time.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
