<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re anything like the managers recently studied by Emma Wiles, a Boston University business professor, treating Alex as a \u201ccoworker\u201d and not a software tool would lead you to do a worse job. Wiles found that people caught 18% fewer errors when the work was said to have come from an agentic \u201cAI employee\u201d rather than a chatbot. It turns out that what\u2019s in a name matters. A lot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is an alarming glimpse of the future Silicon Valley is hurling us toward. Last year Nvidia\u2019s CEO, Jensen Huang, talked about workplaces of \u201cdigital humans.\u201d Since April, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all released new tools oriented toward managing teams of AI agents, many of which are explicitly advertised as digital colleagues with the flexibility and cognitive power of actual humans. And nearly a third of the 1,261 managers who participated in Wiles\u2019s study said their companies already frame AI agents as employees (23% even list them on org charts).<\/p>\n
The technical progress of agentic AI is not all hot air, of course. Agents, which can effectively be thought of as AI tools programmed to work in a loop until they achieve a goal, have become measurably better at more complicated tasks. But it\u2019s a huge leap to refer to these tools as coworkers or employees, and doing so will set unrealistic expectations for what AI can do while leaving the human employees supposedly responsible for them worse off.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s partially because, Wiles\u2019s research suggests, it inverts our sense of who\u2019s in charge. When an AI tool was framed as an employee, participants in the study saw themselves as less responsible for its output. They were also 44% more likely to escalate its questionable work to a manager for further review rather than trusting their own corrections (thus negating the time-saving purpose of using the AI agent in the first place).\u00a0<\/p>\n
That matters far beyond office culture: As AI agents are embedded into health care, warfare, education, and government, there\u2019s a growing risk they\u2019ll become a convenient place to dump blame for failures that are instead the product of bad human decisions, incentives, and oversight (recall how the bomb strike on a girls\u2019 school in Iran was popularly blamed on Claude, when all signs point to a cascade of human errors).<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
#agents #coworkers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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