Research: Why You Shouldn’t Treat AI Agents Like Employees (opens in new tab)

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...