How AI Could Make You Boring and Stall Your Career
A Columbia Business School professor warns that leaning on AI the wrong way at work can quietly kill your edge and leave you behind.
You think AI is making you sharper. A top business school professor says it might be doing the opposite — and you won't even notice until it's too late.
Sandra Matz, a professor at Columbia Business School, is sounding the alarm on how workers are using AI tools day-to-day. Her core warning: leaning on AI in the wrong ways risks making you "boring" at work. That's not just an insult — it's a career death sentence in competitive environments where originality and critical thinking are what get you promoted.
Read more Amazon Shuts Down Another Facility, Cutting Nearly 500 Jobs →
The specific danger Matz flags is complacency. When AI handles your thinking, your analysis, your writing — you stop exercising those muscles. Over time, you're not augmenting your skills, you're outsourcing them. The result is what she describes as "gradually falling behind and becoming complacent." You stay busy, your output looks fine, but you're hollowing out the very capabilities that made you valuable in the first place.
This is the AI trap nobody talks about. Everyone's focused on who AI will replace outright. But Matz is pointing at a subtler, more personal risk — the slow erosion of your professional identity. You become a prompt engineer for your own job, and when the AI scaffolding gets pulled away, there's nothing underneath.
The tradeable takeaway here: use AI as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter. Let it challenge your thinking, not replace it. The professionals who come out ahead won't be the ones who used AI the most — they'll be the ones who used it without losing themselves in the process. Continue reading at US Top News and Analysis.
