One Year Into a Company-Wide AI Rollout, Engineers Report Accountability Anxiety and Craft Identity Disruption

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Organizational AI adoption strategies focus on tangible outcomes like productivity, but AI is introduced into settings where role identity, team norms and the sources of job satisfaction were established long before generative AI. This case study at a large software development services company, conducted one year after its AI adoption launched, collected qualitative data through meetings and semi-structured interviews with 21 software professionals. The reported costs are accountability anxiety, craft identity disruption, and erosion of meaning and satisfaction, alongside the historically familiar deskilling pattern, which argues the assumption that AI for software engineering is cost-free does not hold.