AI may be making you boring at work, Columbia Business School professor warns

Using AI at work in the wrong ways could leave employees gradually falling behind and becoming complacent, according to Sandra Matz, a professor at Columbia Business School, in comments reported by CNBC. Matz argues that when workers turn to AI specifically to outsource critical thinking or creative reasoning, rather than to handle routine or mechanical tasks, they risk two compounding consequences: stagnation, from no longer practicing the underlying skill themselves, and mediocrity, from converging toward the same AI generated outputs as everyone else using similar tools. Her research, described in a paper she calls the Basic B*** Effect, found that when large language models act on a person's behalf, deciding what they buy, watch, or do, the resulting decisions become measurably more similar to other people's choices and less varied over time than decisions made without AI assistance. The finding cuts against a common assumption that AI personalization makes outcomes more tailored to each individual, suggesting instead that heavy reliance on AI recommendation and decision making can produce a homogenizing effect precisely because many people are drawing on the same underlying models. For workers, Matz's broader point is that AI's career risk is not simply job displacement but a subtler erosion of the individual judgment and creative distinctiveness that make any one worker's contributions genuinely their own rather than interchangeable with a colleague's.