- February 16, 2026
- By Carrie Handwerker
Companies are racing to roll out new artificial intelligence technology to replicate what star employees do to boost the bottom line. But that can actually hurt the firm, finds new research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Assistant Professor of decision, operations and information technologies Manmohan Aseri, co-author of the study forthcoming in Management Science, looked at environments like sales where employee compensation is strongly tied to performance goals with collaborators from Auburn University and the University of Pittsburgh. Such firms may push their best-performing employees to use and train AI tools—essentially teaching the system the star employee’s tricks and tactics—resulting in a leveled playing field.
But in firms with pay-for-performance arrangements, “star employees basically lose their competitive advantage,” Aseri said. “And because of that, they might lower their effort,” resulting in damage to the firm’s productivity.
The only strategy to effectively mitigate this issue is to deliberately “dumb down” the AI—adopting it only at a partial scale, he said. That means leveraging AI to help, but not actually enough to level the playing field and render the best employees’ skills meaningless.
For employers, the key message is to slow down the AI rush, said Aseri. He calls for a “graded adoption of AI,” rather than a “knee-jerk” overnight rollout, which is currently the trend in many industries. For top employees, Aseri said, the research offers a powerful negotiation tool: Demand protection of exclusivity over the AI trained on their knowledge and skills to make sure they stay valuable to the organization—and motivated to continue to perform. After all, it’s their human expertise that adds up to the success of any AI implementation.
The study also highlights the changing nature of essential skills to be a top performer in the age of AI. Now that AI excels at technical skills, the “soft skills”—empathy, reading a customer, knowing “when to back off, when to push a bit more”—are more important than ever, said Aseri.