AI Agents Are About to Flood the Workforce. No One’s Ready for It
Muse, like Skydive’s muppets, is represented by a cute and fuzzy little avatar. In the words of WIRED senior writer Reece Rogers, the user experience is something “like texting a friend with task requests—the AI agent acknowledges messages with a thumbs-up emoji and gets to work in the background.” By using existing relationships as a blueprint, these agents—whether they’re AI coworkers or, like Muse, “built for everyone”—offer a shortcut to understanding how to use them.
Anthromorphizing AI comes with specific risks in a work context. Research from Bedard and her colleagues at BCG found that, when managers were told work was completed by an AI employee, they caught 18 percent fewer errors than when told it came from an AI tool. Agents also don’t necessarily fit in the same boxes as human employees, Bedard says, in their abilities or their weaknesses.
“Companies are just starting to wrap their heads around what guardrails” are even applicable, Bedard says.
People forming deep emotional connections with AI is nothing new; people have been dating chatbot companions for years at this point. Even in the workplace, AI tools have sparked some curious reactions. Last year, Henry Blodget—the founder of my former employer, Business Insider—wrote a blog about building a team of digital subordinates, and having a “human response” to the headshot of a particularly attractive AI colleague.
“After a few decades in the human workplace, I’ve learned that sharing certain human thoughts at work is almost always a bad idea,” Blodget wrote. “But did the same rules apply to AI colleagues and native-AI workplaces?”
Sarah Franklin, the CEO of HR company Lattice, has more existential concerns. Lattice added digital employees to the org chart two years ago, before the concept had fully entered the mainstream. Franklin emphasizes that Lattice uses this model to encourage accountability—not to encourage workers to treat AI colleagues as if they were human.
Franklin sees such anthropomorphizing as a strategy by tech companies to get users hooked on their services, unable to resist the dopamine trigger of an emotional connection. While this can help companies build an active user base, Franklin believes it may have detrimental neurological and behavioral repercussions for the human workforce.
“We have these models that have consumed all human knowledge, and are so proud to have these multitrillion valuations—but are potentially destroying humanity,” Franklin says. “It is very scary. And what is the purpose? Is the purpose to put people out of work?”
