Preply has published a study on how the use of AI in workplace writing affects employees' communication skills. The survey found signs that frequent AI users feel less confident in live conversations.
The language-learning company surveyed 1,002 employed people in the US as part of research into workplace communication habits. It found that 33% use AI to write work communications multiple times a day, while 63% use it to avoid difficult conversations at work.
The findings suggest a gap between how workers feel about AI-assisted writing and how they cope when responding in person. Among workers who use AI for writing every day at work, 71% said AI had increased confidence in their communication skills, compared with 53% of workers overall.
That increase did not consistently carry over to offline or unscripted settings. More than half of respondents (51%) said using AI had made spontaneous conversation feel more difficult, rising to 66% among Gen Z workers. Another 44% said they sometimes freeze during in-person conversations because they cannot first review or edit their words.
Daily AI users were more likely than workers overall to report lower confidence in several common workplace situations without AI. In group presentations, 28.7% of daily AI users felt less confident, compared with 21.9% overall. When giving critical feedback, the figures were 33.7% and 28.0%, respectively.
The same pattern appeared elsewhere. Some 37.7% of daily users reported lower confidence in writing professionally without AI, compared with 31.1% overall, while 26.8% felt less confident speaking in meetings, against 20.5% across all workers. For networking or socialising at a professional event, 23.5% of daily users reported reduced confidence, compared with 16.6% overall.
Polish gap
The research also examined what it called the "AI polish gap", in which workers believe AI-assisted writing can make people appear more articulate than they feel in direct conversation. Among daily AI users, 86% said AI makes people appear more skilled and articulate than they really are, compared with 82% of workers overall.
Frequent users also expressed greater confidence in detecting machine-written text. Some 81% of daily AI users said they could identify AI-generated writing, compared with 73% of workers overall.
The data adds to a broader office debate over whether AI tools are changing not only how people draft emails, messages and reports, but also how they approach difficult or unplanned exchanges with colleagues. The survey suggests that, for some workers, regular reliance on AI in written communication may be linked to discomfort in more immediate forms of interaction.
Generational differences also stood out. Gen Z workers were more likely than the wider workforce to say spontaneous conversation had become harder when they used AI, at 66% compared with 51% overall. The release did not provide a broader age breakdown for the remaining findings.
Workplace habits
The survey covered full-time and part-time employees and was carried out with Dataframe in May among 1,142 US respondents. Of those, 1,002 said they were employed, and percentages were rounded where applicable.
Preply framed the findings around growing reliance on AI to draft, edit, translate and prepare for challenging workplace discussions. It said the results point to a need for workers to keep practising live communication rather than relying too heavily on systems that let them refine responses before sending them.
Its figures suggest the issue is not limited to occasional users. Workers who turn to AI several times a day were the most likely to both report a rise in confidence and acknowledge weaker confidence in speaking, presenting, and handling interpersonal situations without technological support.
One of the clearest signs of that tension was the contrast between the 71% of daily AI users who said AI had increased confidence in their communication skills and the 51% of all workers who said it had made spontaneous conversation harder.