Adaptability is one of humans’ strongest traits. Consider how fast people came to accept ChatGPT. In February 2023, ChatGPT made headlines for purportedly being the fastest-growing consumer app in history. It reached 100 million users within two months, years faster than both Instagram and Netflix, making it a clear example of speedy technology adoption.
That adoption curve has real implications for how work gets done. The EY 2025 Work Reimagined Survey polled 15,000 employees across 29 countries. It found 88% of workers now use AI in their jobs.
But here’s the worrying part for that report: “Thirty-seven percent of employee respondents worry that overreliance on AI could erode their skills and expertise.”
The Cloudflare Wake-Up Call
The dependency those workers worry about became visible last month during a Cloudflare outage. The disruption impacted major sites, including ChatGPT, revealing how dependent the workforce has become on AI. In a few years, a relatively new tool has moved from “nice to have” to “I can’t do my job without it.
Such over-reliance is the flipside to humanity’s being so malleable. People can quickly come to rely on technological tools, much like a crutch. Think about navigation. In L.A., close to where I now live, motorists once used map-reading to get where they are going.
Nowadays? “Most drivers in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles rely on Google Maps, Waze or their in-car GPS system to navigate the city, but not that long ago, drivers relied on a different type of North Star—one that lived in almost every backseat or glove compartment: the Thomas Guide,” according to LAist.
Technology adoption has also displaced a few cultural mainstays. Mental math has weakened with calculator dependence. Likewise, it was once common to know the phone numbers of your closest friends. Nowadays? Most people barely know their own.
When you step back and consider AI’s prevalence in the workforce, I can’t help but think about jobs like web developers. Ask someone before 1990 to explain this role and they might look at you funny. If not for the Internet, it wouldn’t exist. It’s a symbiotic relationship; the technology creates the role, and the role advances the technology.
As for AI, we’ve already observed just how much quicker its adoption rate has been than nearly any other technology, at least in recent memory. Because of this, it’s fair to say that when your employee tells you, “I can’t do my job without AI,” they may be referring to one of the two following scenarios.
Scenario 1: AI-Augmented Work
Roles in this category did exist before AI. However, widespread AI adoption now lets people in these roles work faster, and in many cases, better than before. “When consulting firm PwC—which employs thousands of lawyers to provide clients with legal services—provided an AI tool called Harvey to staff, it expected an enthusiastic response from senior lawyers,” according to Fortune. “But in particular it was the junior staff who were ‘really excited about it,’ said Bivek Sharma, partner and chief AI officer at PwC UK …
Harvey uses large language models to help legal teams analyze contracts, draft documents, and streamline research. It’s been so well received at PwC, Sharma said, that ‘if we took Harvey away from our staff, there’d be a riot.’”
Reading this statement, it’s no wonder so many workers were concerned by the Cloudflare outage. Losing AI access is like a builder having to frame a house, not with the power drills he’s used to employing for speed and efficiency, but with an old-fashioned screwdriver and nails.
Scenario 2: AI-Native Work
Then there are roles that didn’t exist before AI. Much like web developers couldn’t operate without the World Wide Web, there would be no prompt engineers without widespread artificial intelligence.
To see what this looks like, consider Anna Bernstein, a 29-year-old working at a generative AI firm. “Her role involves writing text-based prompts that she feeds into the back end of AI tools so they can do things such as generate a blog post or sales email with the proper tone and accurate information,” according to TIME. (This same piece notes that more recent roles like Bernstein’s can pay up to $335,000.)
When access to artificial intelligence goes down for someone like Bernstein with an AI-native role, the effects can be profound. They can’t do their job. It would be like that same builder now having zero tools to frame that same house.
The Future of Business Continuity
Reflecting on how much has changed in the few years since ChatGPT launched, ushering in what some term “The Intelligence Age”, it’s clear there are risks to a society increasingly dependent upon any technology, no matter its usefulness.
For one thing, it’s uncertain where all the continued energy that AI requires will come from in the future. “Morgan Stanley has warned that the United States could face a 45-gigawatt electricity shortage by 2028, a shortfall driven by the rapid expansion of AI-powered data centers. The projected deficit highlights a growing mismatch between data center infrastructure growth and the speed of power grid modernization,” according to MLQ.ai.
The other concern is human capital. Again, it’s wonderful that we are such adaptable creatures, capable of learning new skills and quickly putting them to good use. Yet the EY survey speaks to a worrying pattern: over-dependence on this seemingly essential technology.
To this point, many of us have read alarming stories about how rampant cheating is in colleges, especially by students who use generative AI to write their history papers and/or give them answers to math problems.
At the same time the workforce has adapted to ubiquitous AI tech, students have adapted similarly in school, whether at the college level or earlier. This raises an urgent societal question: If today’s workforce is increasingly dependent on a tool, what happens to all those young people who will never know life without AI? Without deliberate safeguards, do we risk raising a generation that cannot function if the day comes when that technology falters?
Source: Forbes
