"My Little Dirty Secret": Half of Gen Z Feels Guilty Using AI

Half of young workers experience guilt when turning to artificial intelligence to perform their jobs. Yet, it is precisely these skills that employers are increasingly demanding, in some cases even before a degree. This is the circuit breaker that Employment Hero, a personnel management platform, refers to as "the AI paradox," based on a survey conducted on 8,744 managers and employees in the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

In the UK, 41% of workers report feeling guilty about using AI to produce their work, a figure that rises to 51% among Gen Z. In the four surveyed markets, more than four in ten users describe the use of these tools as a form of cheating . The data comes from a company that has a direct interest in the story it tells and should therefore be seen as a signal rather than an absolute truth.

The Hidden Secret

Guilt comes at a cost, as people tend to hide what makes them uncomfortable. Ria Kaur, a college student juggling internships, said it plainly: "AI might seem like my little dirty secret." The cause, according to her, is a stigma that paints young people as lazy: using AI at work leads others to assume they are taking shortcuts, even when it is simply to understand a task or prepare for a meeting.

60% of employers think their staff view AI positively, while more than four employees in ten say that using it feels like cheating. And while 65% of managers assert that AI is speeding up work, 63% of employees respond that it has created more work, in the form of verifying what the machine produces .

Skills that Beat the Degree

What generates discomfort is the very thing that companies are increasingly sifting through in candidates. Among all businesses, AI skills rank sixth on the wish list, at 31%, behind staples like work ethic (56%) and communication (46%); but in AI-centric companies, they rise to first place. Mentions of these skills in job ads have increased by 235% in a year, and according to Employment Hero, "Claude" is the fastest-growing skill term of 2026 . Nearly six in ten companies have already recalibrated their hiring criteria toward AI, with another quarter planning to do so.

However, the workforce has not yet bridged the gap: six in ten employees rate their ability to use these tools as low or average, and thus the younger generation is self-training. Over half claim to have learned AI on social media, peaking at 56% in the UK. Those under 25 are 1.8 times more likely than those over 55 to consider that training their own responsibility, not their employer's.

Meanwhile, the bar continues to shift, along with the very definition of AI. Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, argues that much of what companies label AI is actually old machine learning with a trendy label. What changed his mind, he recounted, was a specific case: one of his collaborators built an agentic system capable of reproducing and verifying academic finance articles, a task that takes six to eight weeks for an expert and which the system accomplished in two to three hours per article. "This is not just a white-collar job; it's a master's or doctoral level job," he said, predicting a "golden age of entrepreneurship" where small teams managing AI agents can challenge giants that once required dozens of people.

Employment Hero remains optimistic: in its report, penned by CEO Ben Thompson, AI acts as a job creator more than a destroyer, and companies that have put it at the center have increased their entry-level staffing at nearly double the rate of those who haven't adopted it. But silence has a cost: if people use AI in the shadows, managers cannot see its real impact, manage risks, or disseminate best practices. "Using AI at work should not feel like cheating," summarized Kevin Fitzgerald, general manager of Employment Hero in the UK: "it should be like using any other tool that helps you do your job."