Workers are hiding their AI productivity hacks from bosses. A Wharton professor says companies should get them to share.

• A Wharton professor said employees are leveraging AI to increase their productivity at work.
• But they're not sharing their discoveries for fear of getting in trouble, he said.
• Companies should offer incentives to try and lure these workers out, the professor said.

A Wharton professor has said companies should try to tempt employees to share how they're using AI to increase their personal productivity – rather than ban the tech and force them to hide it.

While some companies have been upfront about their plans to incorporate AI tools into workflows, others have introduced strict bans over privacy and legal fears. AI-powered tools such as OpenAI's popular ChatGPT – the release of which sparked huge interest in generative AI – have been known to "hallucinate" facts, plagiarize, and produce biased content.

These concerns are understandably worrying for large companies, Ethan Mollick, a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a blogpost.

"Right now, AI doesn't scale well. But, as a personal productivity tool, when operated by someone in their area of expertise it is pretty amazing," he wrote. Employees have already confessed to using AI to boost their productivity and cut their workloads, with some even using it to hold down multiple jobs.

However, employees aren't sharing their discoveries with their bosses for fear of getting in trouble, Mollick said. He advised companies to try and lure these workers out, offering them incentives such as shorter days to share their discoveries. He added the potential productivity gains would make this trade-off worth it for organizations. 

Mollick added that workers are already finding ways to get around bans on using AI at work, such as using their personal phones to access it.

Generative AI is predicted to cause significant upheaval in the labor market, with white-collar and college-educated workers some of the most affected. In March, an analysis from Goldman Sachs estimated that the popular tech could impact 300 million full-time jobs worldwide and boost global labor productivity.