Identity commoditisation is the fear, or the reality, that a professional’s role is being reduced to a commodity. It comes from a year of fieldwork in a hospital group using AI to plan cancer radiotherapy, where the measured gains and the reported losses ran side by side.
The answer, in one line
The fear, or the reality, that a professional's role is being reduced to a commodity. The term and its definition come from Ehsan and colleagues' CHI '26 paper on AI in cancer radiotherapy planning, which spells it commoditization.
Definition#
Identity commoditisation: “the fear (or reality) that a professional’s role is being reduced to a commodity.” The term and the quoted sentence are Ehsan, Passi, Saha, McNutt, Riedl and Alcorn’s (CHI ’26), who spell it “commoditization”. It concerns how a professional sees their own work, not what the work earns.
What the researchers saw#
The study followed 42 people over the first year of routine use of an AI-assisted radiotherapy treatment-planning system: 15 radiation oncologists, 12 medical physicists, 7 dosimetrists and 8 administrators. Graded entry. It is often mis-described. The participants plan treatment rather than read scans, and the system is an optimisation tool, not a generative model.
Early operational gains were real. What the authors report beneath them is what they call “intuition rust”, the gradual dulling of expert judgement, and a change in how practitioners described themselves. Participants spoke of being “AI babysitters” and, in the paper’s spelling, “buttonpushers”. The authors call these harms asymptomatic, because the organisation’s own measures showed only the improvement.
Why a dashboard misses it#
Cycle time and throughput can rise while the practitioner feels their contribution shrinking. Nothing in a productivity measure records that. The finding that matters for a manager is therefore about instruments: the thing an AI deployment is judged by can register the gain and be blind to this cost.
How far the evidence goes#
It is a qualitative field study, and the skill loss it reports was mostly self-reported. The one check was an informal workshop exercise in which a couple of dosimetrists built plans without the AI and took longer. There was no comparison group and no before-and-after measurement, so it cannot stand beside a measured result such as the colonoscopy study in the deskilling definition. The authors themselves say that future mixed-methods work could quantify the rate of erosion. It is also one hospital group in one specialty. Whether the same shift in self-image appears for a paralegal, an auditor or an analyst is untested.
The question it suggests for any supervisory role#
This part is interpretation. When a role narrows to supervising a system, the useful thing to ask the people in it is which part of the work they would still call theirs, and whether they could do it unaided. The answer tends to arrive well before a metric moves. It is also a cheap early warning for the loss that capability debt describes at organisation level. The term itself belongs to Ehsan and colleagues, and no SuperSkills claim is made on it.
Key sources
- Ehsan, U., Passi, S., Saha, K., McNutt, T., Riedl, M. O. and Alcorn, S. (2026). From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing Asymptomatic AI Harms. CHI ’26, ACM, DOI 10.1145/3772318.3791081. Preprint arXiv:2601.21920, 29 January 2026; quotations on this page are from the preprint. Graded entry.
Related SuperSkills research#
See what deskilling is, which professions face the greatest deskilling risk, never-skilling and capability debt.
About this research#
Written by Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), keynote speaker on AI and human capability, and founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company.
Explainer · SS-2026-418 · Graded against the published rubric
Hirji, R. (2026). What is identity commoditisation?. The SuperSkills evidence base, SS-2026-418. https://thesuperskills.com/research/what-is-identity-commoditisation. Last reviewed 12 October 2026.
An evidence review by Rahim Hirji, not peer-reviewed research. For a material claim, cite the underlying study as well; every study here carries its own permanent link.
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