Agentic AI: Don’t Treat Agents Like Employees

As companies increasingly look to accelerate AI adoption, some corporate leaders have stopped treating AI as a tool, and have instead started to treat AI agents as employees, with their own names, titles, and places on the on the org chart.  Some have gone so far as to refer to agents as “teammates.”  Yeah, that’s pretty creepy – and according to this article in The Harvard Business Review, it’s also a really bad idea.  This excerpt explains why people are doing this, and why research suggests it’s a bad move:

Agentic AI systems make this framing feel more plausible. These systems operate with greater autonomy and increasingly can execute some tasks on par with humans. Leaders assume that anthropomorphizing AI will make the technology feel less foreign to workers or that it will signal the company’s AI ambitions to investors, customers, or internal stakeholders.

But it turns out that treating AI as an employee is not so straightforward. In a randomized experiment, we found that humanizing AI can shift accountability away from individuals, increase escalation, reduce review quality, and erode professional identity and trust.  What’s more, it doesn’t meaningfully increase people’s intent to adopt the technology and integrate it into workflows—which remain the key obstacle to capturing AI’s enormous value creation promise.

The article says that the findings of this research indicate that the challenge is not whether to adopt agentic AI, but how to integrate it into workflows while preserving accountability, maintaining quality, and enabling employees to work effectively alongside it.  It goes on to make several specific recommendations about how companies can achieve these objectives.