‘It’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth’: The workplace phenomenon that’s undermining human relationships

Stop if you’ve heard this one before: An employee received a message from her boss and didn’t quite understand its meaning. Suspecting it was written by AI, the employee asked her AI tool to interpret the message. The AI responded and then asked if she wanted a draft response back to her boss. The employee paused. “‘I literally think [my boss’] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,’” the employee told Leena Rinne, vice president of leadership, business, and coaching at Skillsoft, an edtech and skills management platform. She told Rinne, “‘I can’t crack the code of working with [my boss], because it’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.’” Rinne calls this phenomenon “socially offloading,” or when interpersonal skills that require human judgement, empathy, or courage gets outsourced to AI. It’s similar to “cognitive offloading,” or shifting often menial tasks to technology like AI to reduce mental effort, and has the potential to disrupt workplace culture. Social offloading can look like a boss is preparing for a performance review and asking AI how to have the conversation. Or, it could be an employee asking to craft a response to a stressful email from a manager. “If I’m always asking AI how do I respond to my boss,” Rinne told Fortune, “I don’t actually learn how to engage with my boss. I don’t actually learn how to build a relationship with my boss.” Humans are increasingly using AI in more human ways, with the most common use being for therapy and companionship, according to a Harvard Business Review analysis of AI usage patterns. The problem is not that AI doesn’t give helpful advice, Rinne said, but the skills we lose when we rely too much on it. “The risk is then that we don’t develop these critical skills that we can use in the moment, because we don’t know how to navigate emotional intelligence, if AI is navigating emotional intelligence for us,” Rinne said. Skillsoft uses and