When My Skill Becomes Agent Skill: How Knowledge Workers Share Their Expertise with AI Systems
Abstract
Organizations have long sought to make workers' expertise reusable by others. Agentic AI changes the nature of such reuse by enabling AI systems to act on workers' knowledge with limited human involvement. This raises the question of how this shift shapes workers' willingness to share their expertise. We conducted an experiment with knowledge workers who created materials incorporating domain knowledge and decided whether to authorize human or AI reuse. We find that AI and human reuse differ primarily in whether workers choose to share their knowledge, rather than in what they choose to share. Participants' reasoning shifts from prosocial considerations when sharing with humans toward concerns about loss of control, replacement, and downstream governance when sharing with AI. These findings suggest that AI reuse may intensify tensions between organizational knowledge reuse and contributors' interests. We discuss implications for workplace AI and knowledge management policies that preserve workers' rights and agency.
