Why Your Team Hides Its AI Use
By Martin Bergmann | AI Project Lab | October 2026
Picture the last document you wrote with AI’s help. Now, picture adding one line at the bottom: drafted with AI. Most people hesitate at that line. The hesitation is not paranoia. It is a forecast.
It is tempting to explain that hesitation with policy: unclear rules, security worries, doubt about what is allowed. Researchers at Duke found a simpler reason. In a 2025 PNAS paper, Jessica Reif, Richard Larrick, and Jack Soll ran four experiments with roughly 4,400 participants. People who imagined using AI at work expected to be judged as lazier and less competent, and said they would be less willing to tell their manager. When other people did the judging, the expected outcome held: workers who got help from AI were rated lazier and less competent than those who got help from a colleague or other software.
Same habit, opposite verdicts.
The hiring experiment is what makes this actionable. Managers picked a candidate for a task and earned a bonus based on how well that person actually performed. Managers who rarely used AI themselves favored the candidate who did not use it. Managers who used AI often favored the candidate who used it daily.
The tool did not change. The judge did.
So, hiding AI use is not mainly a rules problem. It is a reviewer problem. People are guessing how the person who reviews their work will react to the word "AI," and the study suggests that guess is reasonable when that reviewer rarely uses it.
Two honest limits: the samples were online, collected between March 2024 and February 2025, and the study measures how people are judged, not whether they deserved it.
What to do about it.
The study did not test fixes, but the pattern points to one. Before you ask anyone to share how they use AI, find out who reviews their work, and get those reviewers into the tool, even briefly.
Jeremy Utley describes a simple version. Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, has each person at her weekly leadership meeting share a triumph or a tragedy from working with AI. Either is fine. Sharing nothing is not. The people who judge the work become users, and disclosure becomes expected instead of risky.
A team that hides its use of AI is not being careless. It is reading the room. Until the people doing the judging use AI too, that is a reasonable forecast.
Martin Bergmann is the Director of an IT PMO and founder of the AI Project Lab. He writes about AI, project management, and the future of intelligent work.
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