As AI threads its way through Australian workplaces, workers are grappling with concerns that receive much less attention.
What Australian workers fear most about AI is not losing their job to it.
It’s becoming too reliant on it.
New research from The AI Breakpoint, based on a survey of 1,006 Australian workers aged 18 to 64, finds their top concern about AI in the workplace is becoming too reliant on the technology. More than one in three workers have this concern (36%), compared with one in five (20%) who are concerned about their job or role being displaced.
The question for workers is not only, “Will AI replace me?”
It is also, “What happens to me if I keep using it?”
“And what happens if one day I can’t?”
It comes as half of workers across Australia now use AI at least weekly and one in two say their AI use has increased over the past year.
One female worker aged 18 to 24 in food and hospitality, based in regional Australia, described the tension.
“The biggest impact AI is having on my work and career is trusting AI but not knowing if it is telling the truth or not,” she said.
“So I’m afraid when I’m not supposed to be using it I will write something totally wrong which doesn’t sound in my own words.”
Another female worker aged 25 to 34 in marketing put it more bluntly.
“People are using it for everything, even the most simple tasks, so they’re losing the ability to think for themselves,” she said.
This is the often overlooked workplace AI issue – as AI becomes more commonly used at work, workers are also thinking about what greater reliance might mean for their own skills and independence. These concerns, however, are not distributed evenly across the workforce.
Concern about becoming too reliant on AI is highest among younger workers, before dropping to its lowest point among older workers. An almost mirror image pattern emerges around those worrying about their skills becoming outdated, falling progressively across older age groups.
Rather than these concerns about outdated skills being most prevalent among workers approaching the later stages of their careers, they are strongest among those still building theirs and looking to the decades ahead.
The role-level findings reveal a different pattern. Among entry-level and junior workers, concern about becoming too reliant on AI and concern about job displacement are almost evenly matched. But as workers move up the organisational ladder, those concerns increasingly diverge.
Concern about job loss falls steadily from its peak among entry-level and junior workers to its lowest level among senior managers and executives. Concern about becoming too reliant on AI follows an opposing trajectory, rising from its lowest level among junior workers to its peak among senior leaders.
The findings suggest the nature of AI anxiety changes with workers’ position in the workplace. At entry level, displacement remains a comparatively immediate concern. Further up the organisational ladder, this fear recedes substantially while concern about becoming too reliant on AI increases.
This is particularly notable given senior leaders are also among the workers reporting some of the highest AI use and productivity benefits. It shows AI can improve someone’s work while simultaneously making them question how reliant they are becoming on it.
The pattern is also widespread across Australian industries. Despite their different workforces, tasks and levels of AI adoption, concern about becoming too reliant on AI outweighs concern about becoming displaced by it with workers in all industries except technology, media and telecommunications.
Meanwhile, government and public administration workers report the most concern about becoming too reliant on AI, despite being the lowest users of the technology. Workers in technology, media and telecommunications, who are AI's most frequent users, fear reliance on the technology the least, but at the same time have the highest concern about their job or role being displaced by it.
Despite these concerns, the broader picture is not one of a workforce turning against AI. The report shows that most workers are not anti-AI. Many are using it and many see benefits from using it. They are more likely to see AI as positive for their own profession than negative, and most say it has made no real change to their own career security.
Breakpoint founder Ian Walker said this helps explain why job loss is not the top AI concern of Australian workers.
“For many workers the more immediate anxiety is not that AI will suddenly remove their job, but that it may gradually change their ability to do their own,” he said.
"This means workers also need reassurance about how they can develop while using AI without losing the ability to do their jobs without it. This is needed as much for junior workers as it is for those leading them."
The next phase of AI adoption will therefore be about helping workers use it well, in a way which is good for them, rather than simply assuaging concerns about job loss. Without that, workplaces run the risk of a workforce that uses AI more while becoming less confident in what it can do without it.
And in today's world, workers need to be confident with both.
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