Picture this. A man in a bathrobe, paranoid, half-stoned, hiding in a small house in Northern California. He used to be a revolutionary — part of a radical underground group called the French 75. Sixteen years ago, he believed he was going to take the system down…but today? He’s a wreck. The system kept moving. His daughter is a teenager who barely knows what he stood for. He’s an idealist who never won — and who can’t stop fighting a war that’s already over.
You might be wondering who this man is? Well, he’s more famous than you think: That’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film. And as a behavioral economist by education, I can’t help thinking that — right now, in 2026 — there are millions of professionals walking around the office in that exact bathrobe. Not literally, obviously, but Metaphorically. Yes, Sincere resistance, doomed to fail.
Because here’s a number that should stop you cold: a recent survey by Writer and Workplace Intelligence found that 44% of Gen Z employees are actively sabotaging their own company’s AI rollout. Forty-four percent. Some are just refusing to use the tools, others are even feeding proprietary company data into public AI systems just to prove leadership shouldn’t trust the technology. True sabotage From inside the building and from behind a desktop.
And before you chalk it up to laziness or generational attitude — it’s not. It’s fear. And that fear has a name that we are going to explore in this article.
The Fear Has a Name
Let’s get back to that fear- it is called FOBO. Fear Of Becoming Obsolete. It’s the new FOMO — except instead of missing a party or day one of Coachella, you miss your career. Your kid’s college tuition. Your mortgage. Your professional identity.
Now, the Writer and Workplace Intelligence survey is striking. 29% of all employees admit to actively sabotaging their company’s AI rollout. Among Gen Z, that number jumps to 44%. Almost half. Of the generation everyone assumed would be the natural champions of AI in the workplace.
Pause on that.
The generation that grew up with smartphones in their cribs is the same generation most likely to sabotage AI at work. That sounds counterintuitive at first, so Why they do that? Because they’re the first ones who can see — clearly, no illusions — what AI is going to do to entry-level white-collar work. They graduated into a job market where the rungs of the career ladder are being sawed off in real time, and their response is not enthusiasm. It’s resistance.
And beware, that’s not a generational quirk.
This Is Not New
Because Now… pause here for a second:if you think this is the first time in history that workers have sabotaged the technology coming for their jobs, you should meet the Luddites.
England, 1811. Textile workers in Nottingham start smashing the recently invented mechanical looms in the middle of the night. They organize., they wear masks, and they even sign their letters “Ned Ludd.” Within two years, the British government deploys more troops to suppress the Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon in Spain. Let that sink in. More soldiers were used against their own factory workers than against the French army.
And here’s where most people get the Luddites wrong. They were not anti-technology. The journalist Brian Merchant, in his 2023 book Blood in the Machine, makes this really clear: the Luddites were skilled craftsmen who had spent years apprenticing in their trade, and they weren’t smashing looms because they hated machines. but they were doing that because the factory owners were using those machines to break apprenticeship traditions, slash wages, and put children to work in conditions that killed them.
The Luddites weren’t fighting the future. They were fighting a particular kind of future — one where the productivity gains of new technology went entirely to capital and none of it to labor.
See the parallel? Your Gen Z employee feeding proprietary data into ChatGPT to embarrass leadership is not the first person in history to do this. They’re the latest version of a pattern that’s more than 215 years old. And the pattern says: when workers feel the technology is being done TO them instead of WITH them, they fight back. Sometimes with hammers. Today, with sabotage from a laptop.
Why This Backfires Anyway
But here’s the brutal truth. The Luddites lost. Every single time labor has tried to stop technological change through sabotage, it has lost. And the AI saboteurs of 2026 are going to lose too — for two specific reasons.
Reason one. 77% of executives surveyed say they are less likely to promote employees who refuse to use AI. Seventy-seven percent. The very people who decide your next raise, your next title, your next stretch assignment have already decided that AI fluency is non-negotiable. So when you sabotage your company’s AI rollout, you are not protecting your career. You are sabotaging your career. The bathrobe is on you, not the system.
Reason two — and this one is more subtle. Most people who refuse to use AI think they’re standing still. They’re not. They’re falling behind, and here’s why. You might feel just as productive as you were two years ago: Same output, same hours, same quality. Fine: The problem is that “same as before” now means below average. Everyone around you has turbocharged their output with AI., and your normal is now everyone else’s floor. Your old A-grade work is now their C-grade work. And in a labor market where layoffs are already hitting every sector, as we’ve explored in episode 204, “below average” is a very dangerous place to be.
So FOBO — Fear Of Becoming Obsolete — produces exactly the behavior that creates obsolescence. Sabotage doesn’t protect you. It accelerates the very thing you’re afraid of.
It’s DiCaprio in the bathrobe. Sincere resistance, doomed to fail.
What Leaders Must Do
Now… if you’re a leader reading to this, here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Because if 44% of your Gen Z workforce is sabotaging your AI strategy, that is not their failure.
That is your failure.
I’ve spent the last year studying this and summed up the findings in my book Between You and AI. The framework rests on three pillars — Cognitive, Behavioral, and Emotional. And what we’re talking about today lives entirely in the third one. The Emotional pillar. Three skills inside it: Empathy, Trust, and Agency. Those are exactly the three moves leaders need to make to kill sabotage at the root.
It’s three. Let me walk through each.
One: Empathy. Name the fear out loud. Stop pretending FOBO doesn’t exist in your company. Stop sending all-hands emails about “exciting AI transformation” while your people are quietly Googling “what jobs are safe from AI.” Hold the conversation people are already having in their heads. The first leader in your industry to publicly say “I know you’re scared, here’s what we’re going to do about it” is going to win the talent war for the next decade.
Two: Trust. Build the AI rollout WITH your people, not TO them. The Luddites lesson is clear: when workers feel they have no voice in how the technology gets deployed, they break it. So co-design. Pilot with the team, not on the team. Share the productivity gains — in compensation, in time back, in real visible ways. Make it obvious that AI is not a transfer of value from labor to capital. Otherwise, you’ll have hammers in your codebase.
Three: Agency. Give people ownership. Let them choose which workflows they automate first. Let them be the ones who build the prompts, decide where AI gets used and where humans stay in the driver’s seat. Mandates produce sabotage. Ownership produces innovation. It’s that simple.
Empathy. Trust. Agency. Three moves. Do them, and your AI strategy survives.
Skip them, and you’re going to wake up one morning and realize that your future leaders have been quietly burning the building down from the inside while you congratulated yourself on your AI transformation roadmap.
So here’s the reframe I want to leave you with.
The bathrobe is contagious. And right now, 44% of your future leaders are already wearing it.
For current leaders: Empathy. Trust. Agency.
For everyone else, here’s the honest truth. The fear is real. FOBO is real. But sabotage is the bathrobe, not the cure. The answer is to use AI so well, so visibly, so creatively, that you become the person leadership can’t promote fast enough. Because in 2026, the real fear is not Fear of Becoming Obsolete. It’s Fear of Becoming Overlooked. In an AI world, it’s not enough to avoid being replaced. You have to be seen.
So what will it be? You want to be seen as a resistant, or as an adopter? I’ll leave you with the choice.
Check out my book Between You and AI, published by Wiley, and you can find everything about me at andreaiorio.com.
