The AI conversation at work has shifted. It’s no longer just about whether AI will take your job — it’s about whether your colleague is better at using AI than you are.
A report from Resume Now, covered by HRD New Zealand on 24 August, found that 24 per cent of workers already feel they are far or somewhat behind their colleagues when it comes to AI skills. Another 33 per cent think they are ahead. The comparison game is well underway.
What makes this notable is the anxiety underneath the numbers. Thirty-nine per cent of workers said they are concerned about how quickly their colleagues are adapting to AI tools — not because AI itself is threatening, but because faster adopters might gain a competitive edge in promotions, assignments, or simply staying employed. The report frames it bluntly: “Workers increasingly view AI adoption as a potential source of workplace advantage.”
The Rising Bar, Not the Shrinking Pool
The data lines up with what labour economists have been saying for months. As The Guardian reported earlier this month, the mass job displacement predicted by AI pessimists hasn’t materialised. Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research found that unemployment for the 20 per cent of workers most exposed to AI rose by 0.77 percentage points since 2022 — less than the 0.85-point increase for the least-exposed workers.
But the nature of work is changing. ZipRecruiter’s latest employer survey found that 74 per cent of employers consider AI skills a strong advantage or requirement, with 13 per cent requiring them company-wide. Half expect candidates to already be practical or advanced AI users on day one.
Nicole Bachaud, a labour economist at ZipRecruiter, put it cleanly: “The clearest trend line is a rising bar rather than a shrinking pool.” The challenge for workers is increasingly about skills-matching rather than pure job scarcity.
That rising bar is what’s driving the coworker comparisons. It’s one thing to be told AI skills matter in the abstract. It’s another to watch the person at the next desk get faster, produce more, and maybe catch the boss’s eye because they’ve figured out how to use an AI tool you haven’t touched yet.
The Toll on Workplace Relationships
The Resume Now report touches a nerve that goes beyond skills. Thirty-seven per cent of employees said they feel pressure to develop AI skills on their own time — evenings, weekends, their own dime. That’s not training. That’s self-preservation.
Previous research from The Adaptavist Group found that one in four employees would rather engage in small talk with an AI bot than with a human colleague. The figure rose to 32 per cent for business leaders. If AI is already replacing the water-cooler conversation, the added layer of skills competition risks eroding what’s left of the social fabric at work.
There’s a paradox here. The companies selling AI tools frame them as collaboration enhancers — tools that free up time, automate drudge work, let people focus on the creative stuff. But the actual lived experience for many workers is isolation and pressure. You’re not collaborating with AI. You’re competing through it.
The NZ Angle
The HRD New Zealand coverage is significant because it signals this dynamic has reached the local market. New Zealand businesses have historically lagged the US and Australia in AI adoption — the AI Forum’s Blueprint for Aotearoa, refreshed in May 2026, flagged the skills gap as one of the country’s top barriers to AI uptake.
But the Resume Now data suggests the gap isn’t just between companies. It’s between desks. A worker at a Wellington firm who hasn’t experimented with AI tools may now be measuring themselves against a colleague who has — and the pressure is coming not from management directives but from peer comparison.
This connects to the broader pattern we’ve tracked in our coverage of AI’s quiet crisis in entry-level hiring. The squeeze isn’t just hitting new entrants. It’s creeping sideways through existing teams, turning AI fluency into a status marker.
What Employers Should Be Watching
The report’s recommendation is straightforward: set clear expectations and provide employees with opportunities to develop AI skills on the job, not on their own time. Neal Riley, AI innovation lead at The Adaptavist Group, stressed the importance of fostering an environment that “encourages responsible AI experimentation, and has a framework for measuring success.”
That’s the right instinct. Left unmanaged, the coworker comparison dynamic tends to reward the people who already have the most bandwidth — those who can afford to spend evenings learning prompt engineering, or who have technical backgrounds that make adoption easier. The people who can’t, fall further behind. Not because they’re less capable, but because the race has no uniform starting line.
The companies that handle this well will be the ones that treat AI skills training as infrastructure, not a personal responsibility. The ones that don’t will find that “the rising bar” has a side effect nobody planned for: a workforce quietly divided against itself.
