Why Using AI at Work Might Be Making You Boring

Carmen López · 2026-07-19

There's a strange irony unfolding in offices right now. The very tools we're told will make us sharper, faster, and more valuable might be quietly flattening the thing that makes us worth hiring in the first place. That's the argument coming out of Columbia Business School, and honestly, it's worth sitting with for a minute. A professor there recently made the case that leaning too hard on AI can make you "boring" at work — and that boredom, as it turns out, has a cost. ### What "boring" actually means here When we say someone becomes boring at work, we don't mean they're dull at happy hour. We mean their output starts to sound like everyone else's. Their emails read the same. Their ideas follow the same predictable arc. Their analysis lands in the same tidy, recognizable shape as the person two desks over who's using the exact same tool. AI is trained on the average. It's brilliant at producing the competent, the clean, the acceptable. But competent and clean isn't what gets you remembered in a meeting. It's not what makes a client ask for you by name. ### The real career risk Here's where it gets uncomfortable. If your value at work is mostly "can produce reasonable first drafts quickly," you're now competing with a tool that does that for a fraction of your salary. The people who stay valuable are the ones bringing something the model can't — a weird angle, a hard-won instinct, a read on the room that no training data captured. And that muscle, the one that generates the odd, the personal, the surprising? It atrophies when you outsource every thinking task. > "If AI writes your thinking, you stop being the person who thinks." That's the quiet trap. The tool doesn't take your job. It slowly takes the habits that made you good at it. ### So what do you actually do about it? You don't have to swear off AI — that's not realistic, and it's not the point. The point is using it in a way that keeps your voice intact. - **Draft it yourself first.** Even badly. Even messily. Then let AI polish. The thinking stays yours. - **Use AI as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter.** Ask it to poke holes in your idea instead of generating the idea. - **Protect one "unnecessary" habit.** The walk, the notebook, the long conversation with a colleague. That's where original thought actually lives. - **Notice when your work starts sounding generic.** If you can't tell your last three memos apart, that's the signal. ### The bigger picture The people who'll thrive in 2026 aren't the ones who use AI most. They're the ones who use it most deliberately — who let it handle the tedious and keep the strange, human, slightly unpolished parts for themselves. Boring is comfortable. Boring is efficient. Boring also gets replaced. The trick is staying useful *and* unmistakably you.