Workers are ‘gatekeeping’ skills to protect their jobs from being taken by AI (www.techradar.com)

A new Adaptavist study finds a growing defensive reaction to AI among knowledge workers: 35% report “gatekeeping” skills to protect their roles and one in five feel anxious about being replaced. The firm also reports that 32% of entry-level roles have disappeared since 2022, and people now spend an average 4.3 hours per week in meetings (meeting time has tripled since 2020). Nearly half of employees have sent AI assistants to meetings on their behalf, though 40% view that as rude. These statistics signal both real labor-market disruption and behavioral responses—workers may hoard tacit knowledge rather than document it, slowing organizational learning and degrading the data and documentation pipelines that make AI useful. Adaptavist recommends shifting to asynchronous collaboration, improving documentation, and using AI to surface relevant information so teams can reduce meeting fatigue and build more resilient workflows. For the AI/ML community this matters: knowledge hoarding creates single points of failure and poorer training/knowledge retrieval signals, while thoughtful AI integration (RAG, meeting summarizers, context surfacing) can increase productivity and adoption if paired with cultural change. The core trade-off is clear—without incentives for knowledge sharing, AI risks amplifying job anxiety and institutional fragility; with structured, documented, async workflows, AI can augment rather than replace workers.