Gen Z workers are so fearful AI will take their job they’re intentionally sabotaging their company’s AI rollout

https://fortune.com/2026/04/08/gen-z-workers-sabotage-ai-rollout-backlash/

40 Comments

  1. Just-Grocery-2229 on

    Boss: “How’s the AI integration going?”
    Gen Z: “It’s… a journey. Needs space to grow.”

  2. I’m just gonna have to keep copying and pasting my reply to this story every time it gets posted.

    “AI is such absolute garbage, and such a complete scam, that the Epstein class is now planting stories of sabotage into their propaganda.”

  3. This is being spammed all over the place. Who’s pushing it.

    I don’t buy it for a moment – GenZ loves its AI all over social media.

    Also, This is not a great way to keep your job. CEOs are already telling workers that not using AI is a good way to get fired. I don’t see it as a replacement, but a way to swap old-school work with AI-enabled workers. If you’re opting out of the latter, well ok.

  4. Slow_Balance270 on

    Good.

    We aren’t mature enough of a species to have access even to the limited AI we currently are developing.

    At the end of the day I view the current stage of AI as nothing more than a fancy, digital card catalog and word guesser.

    It’s constantly confidentially incorrect, it often makes guesses or will outright make stuff up.

    During our last employee survey our shift Manager told us that they used ChatGPT to read and deliver the results of the survey to them.

    I askes them if they aren’t going to do their job and read them why are they even being paid.

  5. glittermantis on

    let me guess, this article cites approximately two moderately-retweeted, anecdotal, half-serious tweets about young people doing this, and claims it’s a generation-wide trend?

  6. My friend’s company maintains a leaderboard for token usage and he tells me he instals 100+ mcp servers and useless skills with 20000+ word md files simply to increase token usage. So everyday he finishes up the quota in minutes. 🤣🤣🤣

  7. The majority of AI rollouts that I’ve seen have been “Please guys, find any problem that we can solve with AI. Anything, please. Just do something, the executives don’t have any ideas either but we need AI.” and then they blame the workers when there’s not any useful use case.

  8. BritishAnimator on

    Next up Anti-tamper from disgruntled employee now built into AI, all attempts are silently sent to HR for review. Catches swear words, stupid questions, repeat questions, hack attempts, and calculates wasted time which is docked from salary. – Your welcome.

  9. My company has been trying do more with AI. Our departments new intern was given a project to go through all the chemical cabinets and find out everything that was in them, look up their specific fire codes and compile everything to give to the fire marshall. They were encouraged by a manager to use Copilot to help them with this project. They used Copilot to find all the fire codes for everything and submitted them. Every single one was wrong and someone then need to stay super late and make the list properly, because it was now late and we would have faced a large fine. It’s safe to say that management stopped suggesting to use AI after that.

  10. Me here telling my team that AI is best used to “better understand our domain area and the related data”

  11. If writing shitty documentation is considered sabotaging AI, then I suppose I’m guilty too.  

  12. AGrandNewAdventure on

    No. AI is so fucking awful at 90% of the tasks were being forced to use it for that they refuse to use it. Period.

  13. They aren’t sabotaging anything! Do you have any idea how badly AI does any task put before it? It’s tripling the workload of everything it touches and making worker’s lives miserable! 

  14. Throw them shoes in the gears!

    Isn’t that the root of the word? Sabo being some kinda wooden shoe thrown in the factory works.

    I’ll back a company that sabotages AI companies.

  15. Ai doesn’t need sabotaging when it already does a mediocre job. I tried using ai for coding at my job like legit using it, it basically created a worthless script, full of paths that don’t exist, and it was a joke. If you don’t have the experience or know what you are looking for and take it at face value, you will be S.O.L. It took me longer to debug the script than it would have been to just do my job normally. I had to figure out weird logic that cause weird bugs and behavior. Then you also have to take security into account that ai doesn’t create an app that allows someone to breach your network with ease. It was a mess.

    This is why companies that fired their workforce in favor of Ai such as Microsoft, Amazon and a few others are beginning to rehire the people they fired because Ai was an absolute mess for them.

    Edit: last gripe, just look at the people who are trying to use Ai as their lawyers and are getting laughed out of court by the judge because of the fake case it’s creating. The anthropic ceo is a joke because he has a product to sell of course he is going to say Ai can replace white collar workers.

  16. StretchMother9627 on

    The torch has been passed finally! When Gen Z kills AI don’t forget the millennials that kill crawled so they could kill run .

  17. No one is actually sabotaging AI. This article is BS so when AI companies go under business owners can just blame employees for its failure not their own.

  18. Why did you delete your comment that was praising the article?

    Here is my reply:

    This is a crap article. They purport 2 things that are both wide spread and more easily explained as incompetence as being wilful sabotage. Not only that, but it’s a questionnaire that is touting correlational as causation. It’s lazy on multiple fronts.

    Its shit journalism.

    Are people sabotaging AI rollouts? For sure, but lumping them in with people who are too stupid to know you shouldn’t put privileged information into public AI is fucking dishonest and which do you think is the bigger set of people?

  19. It’s ironic. Over the years, I have seen that type of guile come from boomers the most. They’re not quick to embrace new technology and, when you pay enough attention, you realise it is on purpose.

    They know better than to target group, so they’re going for the age old tactic of making people want to disassociate themselves with the group people like to dunk on.

    “Yay, look at me using AI unlike those zoomers”.

  20. bikepackerWill on

    We went for beers with our director; a rare event. He told us about his AI escapades he was setting up on the side — not with the prospect of sacking us. I genuinely felt it was with the intent on having us move over to that side of things should this whole thing blow up. We were a small company of just 4 employees.

    Anyway, a few beers in, I spoke my mind a little bit. I could see my MD giving me some serious side-eye (he chatted with the director daily and was a bit scared by him. I barely saw him so I just thought this was a pint with an old man). I said how I’ve felt things in recent years that have had “AI” bolted to them feel a bit cheapened. 

    Mobile phones with barely any hardware changes, yet AI features warrant a price rise. AI televisions …and whatever they do. How I still prefer physical books to ebooks. Etc etc. 

    He then turned slightly and growled “don’t ever assume that you’re a part of some trend.” 

    Probably wise advice to be honest, and I genuinely admired the guy a little bit. His business moves in the last two decades had obviously earned him a lot of money. But part of me is a little smug that we are all collectively leaning against these industry moves. 

  21. vacuous_comment on

    At work today there was a widely disseminated message that advised people on how to use copilot to find a 30 minute free spot on your own schedule today.

    I regard this as the company sabotaging it’s own AI rollout.

  22. I’m a genx tech manager but like to keep my hand in. I’d say I’m fairly AI aware. I’ve recently built a few projects using agentic tools and they are amazing – instead of being a Dev I’m essentially being a product owner, providing business cases and validating the outputs. Fantastic.

    But here is the thing. I spent my entire month’s budget of requests in a single day, have no idea how my code base works (I have great docs but why read them?) and much of my time was spent asking and reasking the same question when the result wasn’t quite right. I got a good tool out of it but did I learn anything?

    When (not if) request costs rocket those people they have built their position on AI will have to justify themselves all over again and the economics won’t make sense. We’ll have a spaghetti stack of inconsistent solutions with no common standards, technologists with no core understanding of how anything works and production issues coming out of every nook and cranny. AI budgets will rocket, leveling out way higher than the pre-ai numbers because the big players will have consolidated into a duopoly who can charge what they want.

    With any luck I’ll be retried by then but there is storm coming and it isn’t the layoffs. It is what comes afterwards.