AI can weaken relationships between people - and teams suffer as a result.
"When people see AI as a more competent, trustworthy, and preferable source of input than a colleague, they replace human interactions that otherwise would have built or maintained trust."
Relationships take time, effort, and practice to keep alive. So in a sense, it shouldn’t be a surprise to see this finding from a survey of more than a thousand desk workers across 20 industries:
“The more they turned to AI instead of a teammate, the more their trust in each other and their ability to coordinate seemed to erode.”
It turns out that if you start asking an AI system instead of your colleague, coordination and trust drop by at least 20%. These technologies are still relatively new; I imagine that over time this will continue to drop. People who feel isolated in their work today will feel more so as this trend solidifies. Similarly, people who feel untrusted today will only feel more so as their teams continue to ask AI systems instead of them.
That doesn’t mean AI is always inherently bad. Like all work processes, it demands that we think hard about culture: what kinds of behaviors and feelings do we want to promote? What’s important to the organization? And do we care more about an individual’s productivity than creating a high-performing team? (We shouldn’t.)
This also rings true:
“People consistently underestimate how enjoyable a human conversation turns out to be. Whether the motivation is fear of judgment or a desire not to impose, avoiding a colleague is hardly a new workplace behavior. AI now provides an alluring alternative that forgoes the social and emotional costs of getting support.”
One way we can counteract this is by making asking for help (and giving it) an explicit norm in our team cultures, and leading by example by doing it ourselves. In remote or hybrid teams that rely on tools like Slack, that also means doing it in a non-private channel, so that other team members can see it and it can become normalized.
Although a bit of a cliché and genuinely heinous if they’re done poorly, I think standups can also be really helpful here, if you can do them live. Here, everyone goes round a circle and talks briefly about what they’re working on, with explicit needs for help made as part of the update. Implicit requests for help can be answered once everyone has gone around the circle.
Can AI help? Totally. As the authors discuss in this piece, you can use technology to help conversations to happen asynchronously, particularly on teams that spread across multiple timezones, and it can actively facilitate connections between people.
Let’s do that, instead of displacing our people and our relationships. AI can be a facilitator between people, but it should never be an intermediator: our relationships, our communities, and our companies will suffer.
