Workers are lying less about AI—but they’ve developed a worse habit

Ask a room full of enterprise software executives whether they’re using AI in a meaningful way, and—according to WalkMe cofounder and CEO Dan Adika —you’ll get almost total silence.

“I was in a conference in Madrid in May, it was the biggest SAP conference.

And I had my keynote and I’m like, ‘Raise your hand if you’re using AI in a meaningful way.’ Now, our survey said 8%.

So I expected 8% to raise hands—two people raised hands.

Two people,” Adika told Fortune .

“That’s the reality.” That anecdote cuts against the reassuring half of a new survey WalkMe is releasing Tuesday.

The company’s third annual AI at Work Pulse Survey, conducted by Propeller Insights among 2,037 working U.S. adults, finds employees are lying less about their AI skills than they were a year ago.

The share who admit to pretending to know AI in a meeting fell from 45.2% in 2025 to 28.3% in 2026.

The share who admit to passing off AI-generated work as their own dropped from 48.7% to 32.5%.

But the survey—and Adika’s own account of selling AI software into enterprises all day—describes a workforce that hasn’t so much improved as it has simply stopped policing itself.

Ninety percent of workers say they feel confident using AI.

Only 24.6% say it works on the first try.

Half say they’ve spent more time trying to get AI to do a task than the task would have taken manually.

“Workers are not becoming more deceptive; they are becoming more comfortable,” the release states, which is another way of saying the lying didn’t go away so much as it became unnecessary.