Still in its infancy, artificial intelligence is delivering even greater benefits than many organizations ever hoped for.
According to new global research from Workday, 62% of employees who use AI say it’s reduced their burnout. Fully 86% percent report greater productivity and an improved ability to focus on higher-value work. Nearly two-thirds say AI has increased their confidence in their ability to succeed in future roles.
Remarkably, all these findings represent a win for employers and employees. For years, companies have sought to improve efficiency, free up employee time, and reduce employee stress—and AI appears to be capable of accomplishing all three.
If you’re wondering where the “but” comes in, it’s here. While AI is clearly helping people work better, it is also weakening the single most important driver of employee well-being there is: human connection.
Our growing reliance on AI to brainstorm, get advice, make decisions and even socialize is gradually reducing the everyday interactions through which trust, learning, culture, belonging—and even mental health—are built.
Loneliness Scares Workers More Than Layoffs
The Workday research reveals a stunning finding: 43% of employees say they are more concerned AI will reduce interactions with colleagues than eliminate their jobs. Already, one-third report rarely or never having conversations with people they work with beyond transactional work tasks during a typical week. Less than half now say it’s easy to make friends at work.
Viewed in isolation, these findings would be disconcerting. Viewed in the context of broader social trends, they become even more alarming. Social connections have weakened significantly since COVID, and Americans already report higher levels of loneliness, fewer close friendships, and less time spent with friends than in previous generations.
A study by the American Survey Center found that by 2021, the percentage of Americans reporting zero friends had already quadrupled, from 3% to 12%. Workday found 14% of employees took time off during the past year after experiencing feelings of loneliness and social isolation.
Today, workers are increasingly turning to chatbots for needs that once influenced them to reach out to teammates. Over the past year, 76% have solicited their advice, 52% have used them for creative ideation—and 37% have relied upon them for companionship. Justifying this new dependence, most people say AI is always available, passes no judgment, and is instantly responsive. Increasingly, AI is becoming the first place employees turn to for answers, ideas, feedback, and problem-solving.
For all the generations that preceded the arrival of AI, work generated countless opportunities for human connection. Employees asked experienced coworkers for help, met in person to brainstorm, collaborated and problem-solved—together. These interactions weren’t just the way work was historically done, they also inherently helped build relationships, friendships, trust, and a sense of safety and belonging. One missed conversation means little, but thousands of missed conversations across an organization can fundamentally alter what holds it together.
Even some of the leaders building these technologies have expressed concern. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, recently cautioned against people becoming emotionally attached to AI companions, describing them as “friends with no future.” Researchers at MIT are beginning to confirm why: Heavier AI chatbot use is associated with greater loneliness, lower levels of real-world social interaction, and higher emotional dependence on the very systems people are turning to for connection.
No one builds a life—or a career—in isolation. The greater risk isn’t that AI replaces human relationships, but that it eliminates the moments that create them.
Belonging Doesn’t Happen by Accident
Belonging—the very thing AI is eroding—is not simply a desirable workplace outcome. It is a foundational requirement for employee well-being. It is built in the small, unremarkable moments that accumulate over time: a colleague who notices you struggling, a hallway conversation that turns into a breakthrough, a team that celebrates together and recovers together.
In the world’s largest employee well-being study—surveying over 15 million people—the Oxford University professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve found that belonging ranks as the single biggest driver of employee well-being. Not compensation. Not flexibility. Not career growth. Belonging. Yet only 6% of managers recognize it as such. When belonging is absent, leaders pay a compounding price: People sense little connection to their team and organization, leaving them wide open to securing it elsewhere. Collaboration becomes transactional, candid conversations become less frequent, mentoring opportunities are lost, and interpersonal trust withers away. And the damage rarely shows up all at once. It accumulates—one missed connection at a time.
Design for human connection
The solution, of course, isn’t to resist AI. The benefits are clearly real and will only grow. The opportunity is for leaders to bring the same intentionality to protecting human connection that their organizations have brought to adopting AI. The challenge is to ensure that efficiency doesn’t become the only thing that matters.
Anchor AI to a higher purpose
Understandably, organizations have so far approached AI as an efficiency tool. This proves to be far too narrow.
As employees have quickly demonstrated an ability to leverage AI to get more things done, leaders must now establish a clearer philosophy for how AI will be used—one that ensures the technology serves human development, creativity, collaboration, and purpose rather than becoming an end in itself. As Seneca warned, all examples of excess become a fault.
Don’t Optimize Away the Human Moments
AI excels at removing friction from work—but not all friction is a waste. Some of the most valuable interactions look inefficient on the surface: slowing down to help a colleague solve a problem, asking a teammate for advice, working through a challenge together. These moments take time and effort. They also build the synergies, trust, learning opportunities that no algorithm can replicate.
Make human coaching nonnegotiable
The psychologist Abraham Maslow famously observed that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Applied here, the temptation to automate human interaction has already led some organizations to replace employee recognition, coaching, emotional support, and career conversations with technology solutions. None of these should ever be outsourced to a chatbot.
Organizations should also rethink managerial span of control with this in mind. A manager’s span should not exceed the number of employees with whom they can realistically meet for 30 minutes every week. In a workplace shaped by technology, regular human coaching is set to become one of the most important—and most irreplaceable—responsibilities a leader has.
Build connection into the structure of work
The next frontier for organizations won’t be operational or technological. It will be relational. Relational infrastructure encompasses the systems and practices that help people build meaningful relationships at work: mentorship programs, collaborative learning experiences, team rituals, cross-team projects, and onboarding experiences that make new employees feel they belong from day one.
But infrastructure isn’t enough. A leader’s true north is to ensure that every person on their team feels known, valued, and connected to something larger than themselves. That requires a quality of attention, care, and human presence that no AI system can replicate. It means leaders noticing when someone is struggling before they say it out loud. It means celebrating the person, not just the performance. It means creating environments where people feel genuinely connected to the people around them and the work they do together.
The future of work will not be a technology problem. It will be a leadership one. The leaders who understand that human connection isn’t a soft benefit—but the foundation everything else is built on—will be the ones worth working for.
