AI chatbots can generate polished responses within seconds, allowing users to refine rough prompts with minimal time and effort.
That speed has made AI tools a daily habit for a growing share of American workers, many of whom treat the trade-off as obviously worth it.
For summarizing meeting notes, automating data entry, and drafting routine documents, AI tools offer a genuine competitive advantage in the workplace.
A growing body of research, however, warns that the advantage carries a hidden cost that compounds over time without obvious warning.
The cost does not appear in the tasks AI handles well, but rather in the judgment, original reasoning, and problem-solving skills it gradually displaces.
Wharton’s cognitive surrender study reveals how AI overrides worker judgment
In a working paper posted in January, Wharton marketing professor Gideon Nave and postdoctoral researcher Steven D. Shaw introduced the concept of “cognitive surrender.”
They describe it as the habit of accepting AI-generated answers with little scrutiny, bypassing both intuition and deliberate reasoning.
The study used nearly 10,000 individual reasoning trials in which some participants could consult a chatbot secretly programmed to deliver either correct or confidently wrong answers.
When the chatbot was right, participants’ accuracy jumped 25 percentage points above the baseline set by people who worked alone.
When it was wrong, accuracy fell 15 points below that same baseline, meaning AI access made them worse off than having no help at all.
Participants accepted the chatbot’s incorrect answers 80% of the time, and their confidence rose 11.7% regardless of accuracy.
“My biggest takeaway is that when AI is wrong, we see that people end up performing worse than if they had no AI at all and become more confident in their wrong answers,” Nave told Forbes.
Early-career workers face the steepest risk from AI-driven skill erosion
The Wharton data raises a pointed concern for workers in the early stages of their careers, when judgment and expertise are still developing.
Dorothy Leidner, a business and ethics professor at the University of Virginia, has warned that the risk hits hardest for those who lack foundational experience.
“The risk is higher for younger workers who do not have a deep expertise to help them use AI as a thought enhancer rather than a thought generator,” Leidner told CNBC.
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Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, an information science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, uses a related concept he calls “cognitive debt.”
The term describes the capability that erodes each time an employee lets AI make a decision that requires independent judgment, Jarrahi explained to Human Resources Director (HRD).
He warns that the most dangerous category of AI delegation involves the hard judgment calls where independent thinking develops through repetition and experience.
Researchers warn that AI overuse erodes both originality and brain function
The concern extends beyond individual skill loss into the quality and originality of the ideas employees produce for their organizations.
Sandra Matz, a professor of business at Columbia Business School, has published research showing that AI-assisted choices become increasingly predictable and less varied over time.
The underlying ideas converge toward the same outputs, even when the surface-level language still appears diverse, the study found.
“When employees use it to outsource critical thinking or creative reasoning, there’s a real risk of gradually falling behind and becoming complacent,” Matz told CNBC.
Adam Green, a neuroscience professor at Georgetown University, reinforces the concern from a biological perspective through his laboratory research.
Unpracticed cognitive skills undergo measurable physical deterioration in the brain through the same neuroplasticity that builds them, Green explained to HRD.
Where the line falls between helpful AI and a career liability
The key takeaway is not to stop using artificial intelligence but to use it more thoughtfully and carefully.
Americus Reed II, a marketing professor at the Wharton School, draws a clear boundary between productive and destructive uses of AI in comments shared with CNBC.
It should remove friction, not replace judgment. The goal is to spend less time processing information and more time creating meaning.
Reed points to summarizing information, analyzing data, and organizing ideas as areas where AI adds clear value, while flagging judgment-intensive work as the terrain where users need to keep their reasoning in the loop.
The 2026 International AI Safety Report, backed by expert nominees from more than 30 countries and international organizations, found that reliance on AI tools can weaken critical thinking skills and encourage “automation bias.”
The pay premium on AI skills is rising, but AI fluency alone isn’t the whole story
For workers navigating a job market absorbing AI at an accelerating pace, the central takeaway from this body of research is direct.
The researchers cited above converge on a shared warning: The tools themselves are not the threat, but uncritical dependence on them can quietly erode the judgment and reasoning skills that make workers hard to replace.
Job postings that list AI-related skills already command salaries roughly 28% higher than those without them, research from labor analytics firm Lightcast has indicated.
The workers who benefit most from AI in the long run will be those who combine AI skills with their own critical thinking and judgment.
The Wharton study’s closing recommendation is therefore blunt. AI systems need to prompt people to think, not to think for them, Shaw and Nave concluded.
Until the tools are redesigned to do that, Shaw and Nave argue, the responsibility for maintaining independent judgment rests with the individual user.
Related: J.P. Morgan examines if AI is really after your paycheck
