Enterprise Tech Unsettling Relationships Developing Between Workers And AI Coworkers By Joe McKendrick ,
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Joe McKendrick covers how technology moves markets and careers Follow Author Jun 25, 2026, 11:47pm EDT Jun 25, 2026, 11:57pm EDT --:-- / --:-- This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . Summary Employees are forming complex, often unhealthy, relationships with AI coworkers, relying on them for personal support, career advice, and emotional validation, roles traditionally filled by human colleagues. This trend, partly driven by workplace loneliness, risks eroding company culture and coworker cohesion. Experts emphasize that AI is fundamentally different from human coworkers, requiring clear protocols and shifting human roles from operating to instructing, prioritizing judgment. Many workers personify AI, treating it as a "friend" or "teammate," and seeking life advice. To mitigate risks, experts advise against overhumanizing AI and suggest designing systems that encourage human interaction, especially for critical functions like mentoring and conflict resolution, to preserve human connection and critical thinking.
How we get along with AI getty Navigating relationships can often have their difficulties, and the budding relationships between employees and their new AI coworkers are no exception. Employees aren’t exactly shunning their new coworkers, and in some cases may even be developing unhealthy relationships.
Looking at these relationship issues from different perspectives, three commentators suggest that AI coworkers require far different protocols than human workers, yet in some ways, still act as confidants.
“What actually changes when AI stops being a tool you use and starts being a co-worker?” was a question recently put forth by Ved Sen, head of innovation for TCS UK and Ireland. For starters, AI is nothing like a human coworker both in structure and capabilities.
The relationship between workers and AI coworkers may even be going beyond the bounds of professional working relationships. Employees are turning to AI “for personal support, including career advice and emotional validation – things that coworkers traditionally provide.”
That’s the word from Constance Noonan Hadley and Sarah Wright, writing in Harvard Business Review. More than half the 1,545 knowledge workers they studied, relatively far along the AI adoption curve, report they were “lonely at work,” and were relying on AI for social support. Such unsettling relationships "might erode company cultures and coworker cohesion in the future,” they warn,
The “co-worker as a system is a very different kind of being,” Sen advises. “It can be much more omniscient” when it comes to task performance. At the same time, AI coworkers have less flexibility in how they interact – requiring "clear ownership, a defined scope, an understood failure mode, and someone accountable for the outcome,” he observed. “Most enterprise AI deployments today have none of those things cleanly established.”
Then there’s the interface question. “If ambient AI handles much of the execution layer, the human role in that loop shifts – you’re no longer operating the system - click by click. You’re now instructing it. That’s a big change in the role and skills,” said Sen.
This is part of the decline of the traditional user interface. “Buttons, dashboards, ap…