Can AI be your coworker?

New research is shining a light on how the human-AI relationship is evolving in the workplace

BY NOW, WE can assume that most people are using some kind of AI model for some sort of use case. Some of these are specific, and some are using it as more of a generalized personal assistant. That, naturally, has led to a debate over whether AI is a teammate, a tool or a threat.

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A new report from gig platform Upwork found that as more and more professionals take AI tools available and run with them, they’re viewing their chosen tools as teammates of a sort ― a major development in AI technology, but something they caution is not without risks.

“AI is now a teammate, not just a tool, and workers are starting to bond with AI more than with each other,” Upwork found. “As AI becomes a coworker, organizations need to think beyond simply deploying AI and instead reimagine work for human-centred, AI-empowered talent.”

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The point Upwork’s new report seems to focus on is that this teammate relationship is key to delivering productivity gains, which had been hard to locate in the early days of AI, particularly when looking at ROI data ― companies were opening the cash spigots to throw towards AI but were hard pressed to show results. Upwork’s study found that productivity improvements came along with this new teammate dynamic. Workers, they said, are now self-reporting “a 40 per cent increase in productivity.”

But… there’s a but here. Experts reacting to Upwork’s data pointed out potential pitfalls. One is that few believe the tech is necessarily at the point where it can be given decision-making power, which all users aren’t necessarily aware of. “The questions we should be asking is, how much autonomy are we willing to give AIs,” asked University of Calgary business professor Mohammad Keyhani. He told HR Reporter he tries to teach students to treat AI as a cyborg. “You have to go explore it, figure out what you can do, and you are the ones ultimately who take responsibility for the AI’s work.”

The other thing the data pointed to is a negative correlation between AI adoption and workplace wellbeing. “Workers who are the most productive with AI are also the most burned out and disconnected,” Upwork found. “This isn’t just about tech adoption. It’s a social signal.”

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While three-quarters of business executive said they were seeing productivity gains, Upwork’s research concluded that it was coming at the cost of “the systemic deterioration of employee connections.” And that, experts suggest, is the real challenge of AI implementation facing business leaders over the next five to 10 years.

“There’s a really tough balance to be struck here if you’re leadership in a company,” said Simon Fraser University comp sci professor Nicholas Vincent. “I think that’s going to be a really important issue for the workplace.” Kieran Delamont