New Report: 59% of Employees Use AI to Complete Tasks They Were Never Trained For

TalentLMS has released its Learning Debt Report, finding that employees are increasingly using AI tools to complete work they don't have the skills for—creating a surface appearance of competence that masks a growing backlog of unaddressed training gaps.

The report introduces the concept of "Learning Debt": the accumulating gap between how fast work evolves and how fast employees are actually trained.

Key Findings

• 41% of employees say their role has evolved faster than their company's ability to train them
• 59% use AI tools at least sometimes to complete tasks they were not trained to do
• 37% say AI tools have made them appear more competent at work than they actually are
• 29% have delivered work they could not fully explain if asked how they did it
• 50% agree AI helps them complete tasks even when they don't understand the underlying process
• 47% have stayed quiet about not knowing how to do something, most often because they didn't want to appear incompetent (49%) or were expected to figure things out independently (50%)
• Employees falling behind on learning are nearly 6 times more likely to make preventable mistakes
• 65% say work quality suffers most when skill development falls behind; 50% cite lower productivity

Epignosis CEO Dimitris Tsingos said AI is "blurring the line between learning and doing," and called for training systems that are more tightly connected to the flow of work.

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