Jeff Bezos recently declared that AI is ushering in a “golden age” of the workplace. GoTo's Pulse of Work 2026 report suggests the reality on the ground is rather more complicated.
The research, which surveyed workers across industries on their AI habits and attitudes, paints a picture of adoption outpacing accountability.
Seven in ten employees now admit to misusing AI for high-stakes tasks, up from 54% just a year ago. Half say they rely on it too much. Two-thirds report that reviewing poor AI outputs creates more work than reviewing content written by a colleague.
For customer experience leaders, the findings should not be ignored.
The “high-stakes tasks” employees are handing to AI include legal and compliance work, decisions involving sensitive customer data, and actions that directly affect people's lives.
The AI governance gap runs straight through the front line of customer service.
To understand what's driving the trend, CX Today spoke with David McGlennon, Staff Product Manager at GoTo. He said:
“The trajectory does worry me. It's telling us that AI is becoming more and more powerful, and businesses are really keen to adopt it, given the efficiencies it produces.
“But they're not necessarily creating the governance that needs to be set around those tools in that rush.”
That governance gap has several dimensions. McGlennon pointed to the following issues around data access and permissions:
- Whether AI tools are scoped to read-only or can update systems
- Whether they're handling personally identifiable information
- Whether employees even know how to prompt them effectively
“There's quite a few things around governance that companies are likely not covering,” he said, “because maybe they don't have the expertise, but they can obviously see that these tools are so good at producing outputs.”
The Shadow AI Problem
Nowhere is the AI governance gap more acute than with the tools employees are actually choosing.
A recent Gartner study found workers are three times more likely to use third-party generative AI than tools provided by their employer. GoTo's own research tells a similar story; it shows that 84% of employees say companies aren't doing enough on responsible AI use, yet only 48% of IT leaders agree.
McGlennon's explanation for that disconnect is telling. IT leaders, he argues, are operating at a macro level: a policy exists, so in their view, they're covered. Employees, meanwhile, are working day-to-day with whatever fills the gaps their employer hasn't addressed.
“Some of the employees may be using tools that are external to what the business has offered them,” McGlennon said. “This isn't necessarily something that the business has delivered.”
For CX teams, that's a tangible risk. Customer service agents handling sensitive customer data, drafting complaint responses, or managing escalations may be feeding that information into consumer-grade tools with no enterprise governance, no data retention controls, and no audit trail.