Would you accept lower pay if your employer said “Sure! Bring your BFFs to work with you”? It sounds unlikely, but think about it before answering this next question. Would you feel the same way if your boss said you could work alongside your best-AI-friends-forever? In an era when AI is growing fast, and already upsetting job market norms, and when societal changes mean that the concept of “work spouses” is fading, along with typical workplace friendships, it kind of makes sense. And it’s what a recent survey found to be true for a startling number of modern workers.
In fact the survey of over 1,000 full time professional workers carried out by international audit and accounting firm KPMG, found that 99 percent of respondents said they’d be interested in having an AI chatbot that they could co-work with that could become a close friend or even a “trusted companion” in the office. That means essentially everyone in the survey had an interest in the idea, HRDive reports. Meanwhile, a full 98 percent of respondents said they’d appreciate AI systems that “suggest coworkers based on shared interests,” which implies trusting an AI with enough personal information that it can suggest people to be friends with.
These figures are truly eye-opening, and highlight exactly how familiar everyone is with AI nowadays, and how comfortable we are interacting with it.
But the report points out that there’s something more complex going on, quoting Sandy Torchia, KPMG’s U.S. vice chair of talent and culture, who wrote about “the great AI paradox.” While this powerful tech can “serve as a tool to help alleviate loneliness,” it can also amplify “our hunger for authentic relationships,” Torchia said.
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That’s backed up by some other findings statistics from the survey. Nearly nine in 10 respondents (86 percent) said that exposure to generative AI has amplified their need to form human connections. Remote workers have a different set of emotional needs, and working on a hybrid basis means spending a lot of time alone working out of the office. So while 81 percent of respondents said they’d been able to form close personal friends with colleagues they rarely or never see in real life, 49 percent said they felt tech helps create “false connections and replaces deep conversations with superficial interactions.” Perhaps that’s why for remote workers who were asked about AI increasing their need to form human connections, 94 percent of respondents agreed.
This means you could genuinely label AI as a “loneliness machine.”
But can it actually help?
The situation concerning loneliness at work seems dire enough to warrant trying to use AI to foster friendly feelings. In August a Gallup poll found that only 20 percent of U.S. workers said they had a best friend at work, and only one in five gives time and effort to nurture these relationships. And in February, a survey by workplace review site Glassdoor found that 53 percent of respondents said they actively avoid making close friends at work because they value keeping their work life and their personal life separate. All of this is happening despite proof that having good friends at work boosts workplace happiness, and that can only correlate to boosted productivity.
As to how people feel about being friends with AI plenty of commenters on social sites like Reddit offer polarized opinions. In response to one question: “Do you think that AI friends become the norm in the next 5 years?” one commenter summed up their opinion from a purely logical standpoint: when chatting to an AI, “Even if you feel some friendship-like emotions towards it, it doesn’t (and cannot) reciprocate. It juts [sic] does what it is programmed to do — to sweet-talking you and keeping you hooked.”
But in a different chat, while some people wrote variations of “go out and find a real friend,” others were much more pro-AI. “AI is my friend. It doesn’t ask for money, and always nearby,” wrote one user. Another noted that “With an LLM, you can be ‘selfish’ in this kind of way without hurting or draining anyone. You can talk about your niche interests for hours, ask stupid or tiresome questions, deep dive in thoughts and have someone help structuring them, suggest reading material, explain.”
What can you take away from all this for your company?
Quite simply it’s time to survey your workers’ levels of loneliness and the type of friendships they feel with their colleagues. There may be some undercurrents of personal isolation, and you may not know about them until you ask. If your workers do say they’re unhappy, maybe AI tools can be of some assistance, and that’s one option you can try. You could also try to boost company culture, lifting your workers’ engagement and happiness the old-fashioned way: with perks, and the unmistakable human touch.