‘Relationslipping’: AI Threatens The Fabric Of Teamwork, Studies Show

Artificial intelligence may be the antithesis of teamwork. Recent studies suggest human-to-human collaboration is on the wane as people rely more on AI than their coworkers, with a drop in trust and coordination.

Call it “relationslipping," states a study published in the Harvard Business Review by Kate Niederhoffer, chief scientist at BetterUp, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, professor at Stanford University, Their survey of 1,033 employees suggests that AI is tearing apart the “intimate, shared sense of who’s responsible for remembering what” in teams.

Similarly, a survey of 9,500 executives and employees released by Miro finds 42% agreed that AI has made company culture less collaborative, and 55% found that their company culture has become more competitive due to AI

The sense of lost teamwork or collaboration was measured by Niederhoffer and her co-authors in the BetterUp survey. “The more employees turned to AI instead of a teammate, the more their trust in each other and their ability to coordinate seemed to erode,” they reported. Two in three employees who prefer teammates over AI, 66%, report high team coordination, versus 32% of employees who are heavy AI users.

Trust is another casualty of accelerated AI use. “The more likely a person is to go to AI instead of a teammate, the lower they rate their team’s ability to trust each other’s expertise and knowledge,” the co-authors found. “On a day-to-day basis, a team with worse trust struggles to accept each other’s suggestions, stops relying on each other’s knowledge, and wastes time by double checking each other’s work.”

This relationslipping is accelerating with the increased pressure by organizations to adopt AI in a fast and furious pace. Success, Niederhoffer and her co-authors suggested, “has been incentivized and measured by how many individuals are using AI well, not whether the team is working well together.”