Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving rapidly from workplace experiment to everyday infrastructure.

PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears 2026 survey found that 64% of workers had used AI in their roles during the previous 12 months. Twenty-two per cent were using it daily—an increase of more than 50% on the year before.

The appeal is easy to understand.

AI can shorten the distance between a blank page and a useful result. It can help people interrogate information, test an argument and improve an output at speed.

Used well, it does not replace human thought; it extends its reach.

Organizations are seeing gains too. In a global survey of 1,300 leaders, Boston Consulting Group found that companies with mature AI capabilities reported 2.4 times greater growth than those at earlier stages of adoption.

Yet as AI’s value becomes more visible, the human contribution behind it can become easier to overlook.

When Success Feels Borrowed

This tension is already visible in growing interest around AI-related impostor syndrome: the fear that an achievement is no longer fully yours once technology has helped to produce it.

If capable people begin to discount their own contribution, they may lose confidence at precisely the moment organizations need them to learn new ways of working.

But self-doubt is only half of the problem.

The other half emerges when employers discount good work simply because AI helped to create it.

Imagine two employees tackling comparable projects. One submits a technically sound but routine report. The other uses AI to produce an analysis with greater strategic and operational depth. The stronger result still depends on someone framing the problem, supplying context, challenging weak answers and knowing when the output is ready. Yet if a manager labels the first “authentically human” and the second “AI-generated,” attention moves from the quality of the output to the presence of the tool.

Research suggests that this shift in perception is already happening.

A series of studies published in 2026 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology asked 27,491 participants to evaluate creative writing. The research found that work was rated less favourably when people believed it had been produced by or with AI than when it was seen as entirely human.

The writing had not changed. What changed was the story of how it had been created.

The same attribution bias can shape workplace decisions. Recent insights published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America found that disclosing generative AI use in hiring increased perceptions of transparency yet also affected how recruiters judged candidates’ likeability and hireability.

This creates a reinforcing cycle.

Employees may question whether an achievement is truly theirs; managers may undervalue the capabilities that made it possible.

Organizations could promote AI adoption while allowing their performance systems to penalize, however quietly, those who use it most effectively.

As work evolves, so too must the way performance is assessed. Organizations should not stop at whether AI was used but consider what the employee brought to the result: context, originality, critical scrutiny, verification and accountability for the final decision.

Transparency remains important, but disclosure without a credible way to recognise contribution risks introducing a new bias. This points to a wider question: what should count as performance when strong work can be delivered faster and often to a higher standard?

Outcomes will remain central. But greater emphasis may fall on the capabilities behind them: sound decision-making, collaboration and the responsible use of AI. Organizations therefore need to allow their definition of performance to change with the work.

That means updating appraisal, progression and reward to reflect where people now add value. AI is not simply accelerating work. It is transforming what valuable performance looks like.

Leaders that recognise that change will be better placed to identify, develop and reward the capabilities they increasingly need.