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.
by Matthew Kropp, Julie Bedard, Emma Wiles, Megan Hsu and Lisa Krayer
As organizations push to accelerate AI adoption, many leaders are considering a simple idea: Stop treating AI as a tool and start treating it as an employee.
Harvard Business Publishing:
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