Recent research is showing some evidence of unintended consequences, when AI agents are deliberately designated as co-workers, team members.
As organizations experiment with placing AI agents on org charts as “employees,” new research shows this framing has unintended consequences. In a large-scale experiment, anthropomorphizing AI reduced individual accountability, increased unnecessary escalation, lowered review quality, and heightened employee uncertainty about their roles—without improving adoption. The findings suggest the core challenge is not whether to deploy agentic AI, but how to redesign workflows, roles, and governance so humans remain clearly accountable while effectively supervising increasingly capable systems.
Research: Why You Shouldn’t Treat AI Agents Like Employees, by Matthew Kropp, Julie Bedard, Emma Wiles, Megan Hsu and Lisa Krayer
There appears to be a small, but noticeable, degree of abdication of responsibility. Anecdotally, I have observed a few instances over the last few months alone, where someone was asked about an issue or problem in a work product they had provided and they responded with “oh yeah, that was AI” or “yeah, Claude did that.” As if that somehow made the issue okay.
When you think of the technology as a tool, you are more likely to remember that you are the one wielding it.