An Employment Hero study of more than 2,600 people found one in three Australian workers use AI without telling their employer, and two in five feel it is cheating, even as 75% say it improves their productivity. The hiding is a management failure, not a worker one.
When your best people hide the thing that makes them better, that is a leadership gap, not a discipline problem.
One in three Australian workers use AI tools at work without telling their employer, according to a study of more than 2,600 employees and employers from Employment Hero. Many use personal accounts to do it, with 44% of employers reporting staff using personal AI at work. Two in five workers said using the tools felt like cheating.
The productivity numbers make the secrecy look absurd. Three in four workers said AI had improved their productivity, at 75%, and 74% said it had improved the quality of their work. So the tools are working, people know they are working, and a large share are hiding that they use them out of guilt.
Why it matters
For marketing teams this is happening right now, whether you have a policy or not. Your team is drafting copy, summarising research and building first drafts with AI, and if there is no clear guidance, they are doing it quietly on personal accounts with your data. That is a governance risk and a missed chance to lift the whole team. The guilt exists because leadership has not said out loud what is allowed. Silence is the policy, and it is the wrong one.
Australian workers who say AI has improved their productivity, even as many hide that they use it
What to do about it
The productivity is already in the building, hiding on personal logins, and the businesses that bring it into the open will get the upside their competitors are pretending not to use.