White-collar workers are quietly rebelling against AI as 80% outright refuse adoption mandates

https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/ai-backlash-quiet-quitting-fobo-obsolete-white-collar-rebellion/

40 Comments

  1. Niceromancer on

    Companies are going all in on replacing people with AI.

    Of course those people are going to resist it.

  2. Forget the fact that we know why there’s a push to use AI. The current state of AI is not actually useful for most things. It’s very good at some things but hasn’t actually changed much for a lot of people.

    The push is in part cause they want to do more with less and the fact that they need to find value for what they’ve been over paying for.

  3. Keep it up! Fuck that shit! Why on Earth would any human train a robot to replace them.

  4. I think Ai replacing me at the job i now only do for money would be amazing…if our society didnt suck and that was a good thing like it should be.

    A better plow should mean a farmer has to work a little less hard to work the field.

  5. IntolerantModerate on

    As someone who runs a software company it has been a game changer.
    Software is better because it can quietly help behind the scenes, devs are more efficient, our Jr devs are writing more/better code.
    Our sales team is sending better personalized emails.
    All around amazing benefit. But we aren’t using it for HR or accounting or other stuff (yet).

    A good recent example is we needed to parallelize a few services. We had done similar before and it took 2 weeks. AI did it for us in 30 minutes, including all the unit tests to verify same answer before and after.

  6. Writing this while commuting to work for a 3-day AI related summit, some of us have no choice.

  7. LiteratureMindless71 on

    Who would have thought…. The people being “forced” to use the damn stuff says it sucks.

    ……we have had a couple company wide CEO based meetings ourselves that have had the statements “AI is here so make use of it”.……….I just….lol.

  8. truecakesnake on

    Lmao more AI bad news slop for r/technology to circlejerk on. I do know a company where the employees are refusing to use AI. Coincidentally, for some weird reason, that company is doing terribly compared to another one that replaced all their sales/costumer service agents with AI.

  9. Captain_Aizen on

    80% what, where is this article even getting those stats from. I don’t know anybody who’s taking any surveys lately voicing their opinions on mandating with regards to company policy and AI

  10. I suppose this is my hope for AI; that as much as the techbro oligarchs will determinedly shove it onto society, this kind of rebellion against adoption will stifle it and stall it. It’ll still be there, sure, but it’s growth will be hampered by resistance to adoption

  11. My employer has been very smart about llm rollout. But i still feel like i have to apologize for being a luddite sometimes to my peers.  

    I just don’t find these tools that useful. Every time I push myself to use it, I feel like I’m spinning my wheels.  It feels like training an incompetent colleague to do some work for me and it takes longer than doing it myself.  

    Seems like LLMs have legit changed the way that software is made, but i think other fields of work may find it less revolutionary.

  12. IrfanZahoor_950 on

    feels like we’re in that awkward phase where the expectations jumped ahead of actual workflow value. it’s clearly powerful in pockets, but for a lot of roles it still feels like “extra steps” instead of real leverage

    in high volume environments like contact centers, anything that slows down resolution or adds verification just won’t stick. usefulness is measured in seconds, not capability

  13. CircumspectCapybara on

    LLM-based agents are huge in SWE, SRE, and MLE roles these days.

    Far from “refusing adoption,” most large engineering orgs have fully embraced them and it’s becoming clear that the industry isn’t going back to the old way of working.

    Source: Staff SWE @ Google. Used to be an AI skeptic, but I’ve seen how thing have changed rapidly in the span of like six months. 

  14. Meanwhile, I have coworkers who are the opposite. They think AI means they get to checkout entirely and clearly use AI for absolutely everything they do but don’t prompt it correctly, don’t proofread and don’t give any thought to output at all. Now I have to deal with their slop.

  15. Malkovtheclown on

    When someone in the c suite got curious and looked at the sales team of 30k sellers at the company I work for, thet found 50 percent of the revenue was done by the top 10 percent od sellers. There are a lot of people who basically aren’t as productive or good at their jobs. Not saying those people should be fucked over but seriously there is a lot of dead weight on company payrolls.

  16. Our company tried it and it failed massively because everyone saw the writing on the wall.

  17. Setting aside the fact they’re trying to figure out how to replace my role, the AI they gave us is worthless.

  18. DomitiusAhenobarbus_ on

    This article is bullshit. Everyone I know in the tech industry is obsessed with AI. There’s zero push back at my company

  19. Its wrong so often. It starts to feel like im working more on trouble shooting why it isn’t working than doing my actual job

  20. It’s curious that the folks that can’t cope are self identifying and volunteering to be the group that loses their jobs during this transition…

  21. Leptonshavenocolor on

    My work actually tracks your AI usage to hold it against you (not using it)..

  22. As a design industry professional it’s never exceeded more than just using it for sorting existing research for me. And I will keep that way.

  23. My view.

    I never used AI before November.

    Since then. I built a few apps. A few GUIs on my desktop. I used it to sell a house in 3 days in a 6 month market. Last night I used it to do my taxes.

    A 250 dollar subscription has paid for itself for the year already. (Google Ultra plan).

    With the right skill file it goes from a genius that knows nothing about, to being ready to work.

  24. Ai is wrong way to often to be reliable. Also the way most people use it by asking a short sentence makes it way harder for the ai to “understand” what you are asking. To get the best output you need a decent prompt and thats not very well known by the average user

  25. With how poorly business operates, there’s no way AI could interpret what the fuck is going on.

  26. This is like the folk who rebelled against the industrial revolution , it didnt stop the revolution. It just ment they were steamrolled by it

  27. Many companies think AI just means pushing “go” without any coordination. How we have agents making agents, and not getting anything done. There needs to be higher-level direction on how AI is actually supposed to function within an industry, let alone a company.

  28. My son, who is the project manager for a commercial surveying firm, recieved a request for a job quote from a large corporate architectural firm they have done work for for decades. It was 6 pages long, almost all of which was a list of things they DIDN”T need on the survey, as in “depth to utilities: not relevant”. He finally realized it was for a simple title survey, called and confirmed the job. It was clearly the work of AI, probably being jammed into the process, to the detriment of all. Can’t *imagine* why no one wants the “great new thing”.

  29. ive_got_the_narc on

    To me, it’s like using a calculator. I use it for quick info otherwise I don’t really care about it or need to use it at all. It’s pointless and doesn’t serve me with anything that I could just use Wikipedia for.

  30. Infinite-Position-55 on

    In my experience 40 and over is unwilling to learn how to use or leverage AI because they things it a gimmick or they just are to lazy etc. 30 and younger is excited to have something that can do the more annoying or procedural tasks they tested and found AI works great for. Personally I am not white collar so I get to observe from the outside. I am blue collar and I use AI everyday, both Claude and Gemini. It’s not gonna replace my job in the foreseeable future, but it sure does make some things a lot easier.

  31. You would see more performance if you didn’t change UI for software every fucking year so users get lost all the time trying to figure out most basic functions.

    Even fucking search doesn’t find what you have on PC by default anymore.

    What is funny that in some cases AI is pretty nice, but not everywhere yet. A lot of companies fail to use it correctly and even CEOs say it was a mistake to fire people for AI (whether it’s Actually Indian or Artificial Intelligence it would be same result xD).

  32. Imagine being so dense as to refuse to use tools that will make you multiplicatively more efficient than your coworker.

    Quickest way to the unemployment line.

  33. Shinobi-0013 on

    Because no one wants to teach their software replacement.

    Were are building and teaching our replacement. They should rebel because if unemployment gets to certain % you will see a modern day French Revolution.

    Btw just so people understand the unemployment rate in America is based on people who basically are considered out of the workforce like as in gave up not looking for a job but not retired. Which they define 4.4 %

    The actual % of unemployment with people who are looking for work and would be 8.4 % , they redefine terms to make themselves look better.

    Personally we should be rebelling against all leaders because it will eventually happen to everyone. Those robots will be used to replace electricians, carpentry, construction etc. Hell they can all ready use a 3D printer to build parts of a home.

    But people are cowards who won’t disrupt their comfort eventually it will be disrupted for everyone

  34. anaveragebest on

    AI is starting to feel like the new cryptocurrency, but that aside kind of a bold statement to be like “80% refusal”…where do you even come up with that bullshit number. They sampled 3750 people, I’m sure that numbers not right. And how exactly did MIT get the data that 90% of people were using “shadow AI” at work? All the AI companies just gave MIT access to people’s accounts and cross referenced that somehow with input into their work? Sorry but something smells off about this whole thing, a lot of anecdotes

  35. Maybe it could help if AI wasn’t labelled as “recreation purposes only” and accept some kind of liability for its actions.