Research: The Hidden Penalty of Using AI at Work
August 1, 2025
Illustration by Sandra Navarro
Summary.
The VP of engineering at a leading technology company stared at the quarterly adoption metrics with growing frustration. Twelve months after rolling out a state-of-the-art AI coding assistant—a tool that promised to boost developer productivity significantly—only 41% of engineers had even tried it. More troubling still: Female engineers were adopting at just 31%, and engineers 40 and older were adopting at 39%. This finding emerged from ourresearchwith 28,698 software engineers at the company.
Oguz A. Acar is a Chair in Marketing at King’s Business School, King’s College London.
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Phyliss Jia Gai is an assistant professor of marketing at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. Her current interests include technology, identity, and social media.
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Yanping Tu is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She studies social influence, context effects, and decision bias.
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Jiayi Hou is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on digital economy, organizational economics, and development economics.
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