Can Managers Tell if Employees Used Artificial Intelligence to Do Their Work?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the workplace, offering new opportunities for efficiency, creativity, and decision-making. However, as AI tools become more accessible, managers face a new challenge: determining whether employees are using AI to complete their work—and whether this is a positive or negative development.

This article explores practical ways managers can detect AI-generated work, provides examples of when employee use of AI is beneficial, and highlights scenarios where it may be problematic.

Detecting AI Use in Employee Work

Managers can use several strategies to identify when employees have leveraged AI tools:

• Monitoring Software and Usage Analytics: Organizations may deploy monitoring platforms that track which AI tools employees access and how frequently. These systems can reveal unusual patterns, such as sudden increases in productivity or changes in writing style, which may indicate AI involvement. Warning: Employers should be careful to consider the growing number of legislative developments that guardrail and/or have compliance requirements for the use of employee monitoring tools.
• Audit Trails and Data Logging: Use audit trails for compliance and security teams. This is especially important for organizations handling sensitive information. Recommendation: Before you use AI applications, including those used by third parties, ensure you fully understand your organization's ability to track utilization and audit outcomes.
• Content Analysis: AI-generated content often has distinct characteristics—formatting, formality, phrasing, and word choices. Managers may notice patterns, such as identically phrased emails, identical data in reports, or consistent section headings in presentations, which can be a sign of AI use. Questions: Is consistency a bad thing? Is your company culture striving for consistency? Or, is it entrepreneurial, where innovation based on diverse experience is your secret sauce?
• Skill Gap Identification: If employees consistently produce work that exceeds their usual capabilities or expertise, it may signal reliance on AI. This can prompt managers to offer targeted training or support. Hint: Marked improvement in someone’s content-producing capabilities could signal AI use. We will discuss the pros and cons in a moment …
• Errors: AI is prone to hallucinations and often only scrapes publicly available content on the internet, which is not always dependable and can sometimes contain bias. Sign: An employee who suddenly presents more evidence to support a decision may be using AI. This is not always a bad thing, but when the evidence is factually incorrect or contains an AI hallucination, it could result in catastrophic business decision-making. AI is too powerful a tool for someone without the right experience, skills, and level of skepticism.
• Transparency and Disclosure: Encouraging employees to disclose their use of AI tools fosters trust and allows managers to set clear expectations and safeguards. Perspective: Employees will likely be reluctant to share that they have used AI to complete work tasks. Fear may exist that AI can replace them. Employers should be proactive in being honest about AI’s place in strategic planning. For many organizations, that means employees will need to embrace AI at some point. 

When Employee Use of AI Is a Good Thing

AI can be a powerful ally in the workplace when used responsibly and transparently. Here are some positive examples:

• Efficiency and Productivity Gains: AI can automate some manual tasks, freeing employees to focus on higher-value work. For example, trimming down a presentation so that it fits into its 30-minute spot on the agenda.
• Enhanced Creativity and Problem-Solving: Employees using AI for brainstorming or summarizing information can sometimes generate more novel and impactful ideas, accelerating projects and sparking creativity.
• Improved Decision-Making: AI-driven analytics (fully tested and audited, of course) help teams make better-informed decisions by analyzing large datasets and identifying patterns that humans might miss.
• Personalized Employee Experience: Unbiased AI-powered platforms can tailor learning, career development, and engagement tools to individual needs, improving satisfaction and retention.

When and Why Employee Use of AI Is Not a Good Thing

Despite its benefits, AI use can introduce risks and challenges:

• Data Security and Compliance Risks: Employees may inadvertently expose confidential information by inputting sensitive data into public AI tools, risking data breaches and compliance violations.
• Loss of Personalized Customer Focus: Automation is automation, and AI may be a weak communicator's crutch. AI can result in a stark decline in genuine human interactions. And, if that is also part of your organization’s secret sauce, AI can be a dangerous tool.
• Over-Reliance and Skill Degradation: Excessive dependence on AI can erode employees’ ability to perform tasks independently, diminishing continuous skill improvement, critical thinking, and creativity.
• Bias and Fairness Issues: AI systems can perpetuate biases present in their data, leading to inappropriate business decisions and unfair or discriminatory outcomes in hiring, performance evaluations, or promotions.
• Individual Effort and Team Dynamics: Employees who use AI tools may be judged negatively by (perhaps) harder-working coworkers. “Work smarter, not harder” is not always embraced by organizations or managers. And, depending on the task at hand, AI is not necessarily smarter.
• Legal and Risk Concerns: Unapproved AI use can violate company policies, intellectual property rights, and various privacy laws. Lack of transparency in your organization’s use of AI, even if through third parties, and the required oversight increases organizational risk. Legislation controlling the use of AI in employment decisions is trending, and employers must be aware of laws impacting their ability to use AI.

Best Practices for Managers

• Establish Clear AI Governance Policies: Understand and comply with all applicable laws. Define acceptable uses, required disclosures, and safeguards for AI in the workplace. Ensure all staff are trained and understand their responsibilities. Ensure your policy contains a response plan for inappropriate use, data breaches, etc., and address policy violations immediately.
• Promote Transparency: Encourage employees to be upfront about their use of AI tools. Frame AI adoption as a way to elevate jobs and be honest about AI’s place in strategic plans.
• Monitor and Audit: Appoint human oversight. Always review AI outputs for legal compliance, accuracy, relevance, and appropriateness. Continuously assess AI systems for bias, security, and compliance. Update policies as technology evolves.

Conclusion

Managers can sometimes detect AI use through legal use of monitoring tools, content analysis, and open communication. When used legally, in accordance with policy, responsibly, and as the organization intends, AI could drive efficiency, creativity, and better decision-making. However, if left unchecked or undisclosed, AI use can introduce risks such as bad decision-making, a lack of innovation, disconnected customers, a decline in skills and professional development, as well as ethical, legal, cybersecurity, and reputational issues. The key is to balance innovation with oversight, ensuring AI augments rather than undermines the workforce.