Almost half of workers admit they’re faking their AI expertise.

Good morning. Thanks for reading Still Monday. Keep voting, replying and forwarding it to anyone whose company has recently added “AI-first” to a slide without explaining what happens on the next slide.

Today we have a new workplace behavior.

People are pretending to use more AI than they actually do.

Management asked for adoption. The workforce found a KPI.

Let’s get to work.

Companies have spent the last few years telling employees to use AI. Use it faster. Use it more. Experiment. Become AI-native. Put it into the workflow.

Employees appear to have understood the assignment. Or at least the optics.

Visier surveyed 1,000 full-time U.S. employees and found that 48% had exaggerated their AI usage or expertise to colleagues or leadership at least some of the time. Visier calls the behavior “performative AI.” Visier

The number is funny until you consider why people are doing it.

Forty-five percent said they feel pressure to use AI at work even when they are not confident they know how to use it effectively. Seven in ten expressed concern about AI’s negative impact on their careers, including job loss, higher performance expectations, fewer advancement opportunities and skill obsolescence.

Now add one more ingredient: employees are not convinced leadership knows what it is doing.

Only 28% said their leaders fully understand how employees are currently using AI. Thirty-two percent said their employer does not have a clear plan for how AI affects jobs, while another 27% were unsure whether such a plan exists.

Put those numbers together and performative AI becomes surprisingly rational.

Your boss says AI matters. You suspect your career may depend on appearing current. Nobody can clearly explain what good AI usage looks like. So you make sure everybody knows you use AI.

This is not an AI problem. It is a measurement problem.

If leadership rewards visible tool usage, people will produce visible tool usage. If the company asks how many teams are “using AI,” everybody learns to count prompts. If job descriptions suddenly ask for AI fluency without defining it, candidates learn the vocabulary.

The more useful question is boring: What got better?

Did cycle time fall? Did quality improve? Did the customer get a faster answer? Did error rates drop? Did a task disappear? Did employees gain time for something more valuable?

If the answer is no, the prompt count is trivia.

For managers, the worst response to performative AI would be demanding even more visible adoption. Create space for employees to say the tool did not help. Ask where it created rework. Ask what they stopped using it for. Let somebody admit they are still learning without converting that admission into a performance concern.

Real adoption includes failed experiments.

Theater only includes demos.

Visier found 54% of respondents said their roles or careers had significantly changed because of AI during the previous two years. Visier

The job description may still be loading.

Thirty-two percent said more AI training and upskilling would increase their confidence. Thirty-one percent wanted greater transparency from leadership. Both ranked ahead of career advancement and broad reassurance.

“Trust us” remains less useful than “here’s how.”

Visier warns that self-reported AI usage can be distorted when employees feel pressure to demonstrate adoption.

The dashboard may be green because everybody knows which answer the dashboard wants.

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In your next team discussion about AI, ask each person for three examples: one task AI genuinely improved, one where it made the work worse, and one task they tried AI on and then stopped using it.

That gives you much better information than asking whether the team is “using AI.”

Useful technology survives an honest conversation.

AI licenses, training, integrations and employee time all cost money. A company can have high adoption and negative value if people spend hours correcting outputs, duplicating work or using tools simply because leadership expects it.

Measure the economic result of a workflow before celebrating the number of users inside it.

The most expensive AI seat may be the one everybody logs into and nobody needs.

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MANAGER: How much AI are you using?

EMPLOYEE: A lot.

MANAGER: Great. What for?

EMPLOYEE: Mostly answering questions about how much AI I’m using.

MANAGER: Excellent.

MANAGER: Put that in the adoption report.

When people exaggerate a behavior because they believe leadership wants to see it, the fake behavior itself becomes useful information.

It tells you the incentive is stronger than the instruction.

That should interest any manager, whether the subject is AI, office attendance, collaboration or green Slack dots.

Vote below and tell us whether AI usage where you work feels useful, performative, or some creative combination of both.

And forward this to the person who has recently described themselves as “AI-native.”

No follow-up questions.

Technically Thursday. Emotionally AI-enabled.

— The Still Monday Desk