Survey Finds 74% of AI Users Ask Chatbots Questions Before Asking Coworkers

A marketing employee in Colorado named Maria Goyal says her office has a default answer for almost any question: ask Claude. She's 25, has worked at the agency for a year, and told ZDNET the habit is starting to make her feel isolated and self-conscious about approaching more experienced coworkers for help.

"It prevents me from like learning more in depth rather than just having like a robot do it for me," Goyal said.

She's not alone. A July survey from cognitive assessment platform MyIQ found that 74% of people who use AI now ask chatbots questions instead of asking a colleague first, according to ZDNET. Separately, Adobe for Business reported in July that 68% of workers said they'd be more comfortable asking a chatbot an "obvious" question than asking a coworker.

Workday's May research adds another data point: Gen Z workers are 12 times more likely than Gen X workers to say they feel "completely disconnected" from their coworkers, per ZDNET's reporting.

The Strongest Case For the Shift

There's a reasonable, practical argument behind why workers are doing this. Nobody wants to look incompetent by asking a "dumb" question in a meeting or a Slack thread with a permanent record. A chatbot doesn't judge, doesn't gossip, and answers instantly at 11 p.m. or during a lunch break, without making a colleague stop their own work to help.

For routine, low-stakes questions, like how to format a spreadsheet or the right way to phrase an email, this is a legitimate productivity gain. Nobody is arguing that every question needs a human touch. The concern raised by researchers isn't that AI use itself is a problem. It's about which questions are shifting away from humans, and what gets lost when the pattern becomes habitual rather than occasional.

What Researchers Say Gets Lost

Constance Noonan Hadley, founder and chief scientist at the Institute for Life at Work, has studied employee loneliness, burnout, and team dynamics for more than two decades. According to ZDNET, Hadley points to the everyday act of asking a coworker a question as a mechanism that builds trust and shared knowledge across a team, not just an efficient way to get an answer.

Adam Mendler, a leadership instructor at UCLA and host of the "Thirty Minute Mentors" podcast, told ZDNET that AI presents "a really big opportunity" but also a challenge: organizations need to deliberately create more human connection now that a default option exists to avoid it. Mendler's framing puts the responsibility on leaders and managers, not on individual workers choosing a faster tool.

That's a fair distinction. Workers like Goyal aren't necessarily choosing isolation. They're responding to incentives, speed, lower social risk, and a workplace culture that increasingly treats AI tools as the default first stop. If that's true, the fix isn't guilting individual employees. It's building workplace norms and mentorship structures deliberately, rather than assuming human connection will happen automatically.

The Loneliness Backdrop

This data lands against an already grim loneliness backdrop. The CDC estimates roughly one in three American adults report feeling lonely, a trend tied to broader social isolation. At work specifically, that figure is about one in five globally, according to ZDNET's reporting. Remote work's expansion since the COVID-19 pandemic hasn't reversed the trend.

None of the surveys cited prove that AI chatbot use is causing increased loneliness or measurably hurting productivity. The MyIQ, Workday, and Adobe surveys establish a behavioral pattern, not a causal chain. Researchers quoted by ZDNET are explicit that it's too early to say whether this shift will produce a lonelier or less effective workforce. That's an honest and important caveat, and it should stay attached to every headline about this trend, including this one.

What is measurable: a majority of AI-using workers, per MyIQ, are now routing questions to a chatbot first. Whether that's harmless efficiency or a slow erosion of workplace mentorship depends on decisions companies haven't fully made yet, according to the leadership experts ZDNET interviewed.

The open question is what happens to junior employees and new hires, the group most dependent on informal, in-person mentorship to learn a job's unwritten rules. No survey cited here has yet tracked long-term career outcomes for workers who skip human colleagues in favor of a chatbot during their first years on the job. That data doesn't exist yet. Until it does, companies are left making a bet, either that AI accelerates learning, or that it quietly starves it.