‘It’s his AI and my AI going back and forth’: how ‘social overload’ is destroying work relationships
Stop if you’ve heard this before: An employee received a message from his boss and misunderstood its meaning. Suspecting that it was written by AI, the employee asked their AI tool to translate the message. The AI responded and then asked if he wanted a draft response sent back to his supervisor.
The worker paused. “’I think literally [my boss’] AI talking to my AI. That’s a real conversation happening right now,’” an employee told Leena Rinne, vice president of leadership, business, and training at Skillsoft, an edtech and skills management platform. [my boss]because his AI and my AI going back and forth.’”
Rinne calls this situation “social emancipation,” or when interpersonal skills that require human judgment, empathy, or courage are provided by AI. It’s akin to “cognitive offloading,” or turning over mundane tasks to technologies like AI to reduce mental effort, and it has the potential to disrupt workplace culture.
A social upload can look like a manager preparing a performance review and asking the AI how to conduct the interview. Or, it could be an employee asking to make a response to a stressful email from a boss.
“When I’m constantly asking AI how I respond to my boss,” Rinne said good luck, “I don’t really learn how to deal with my boss. I don’t really learn how to build a relationship with my boss.”
People are increasingly using AI in more human ways, the most common uses being therapy and companionship, according to the study. Harvard Business Review analysis of AI usage patterns. The problem isn’t that AI doesn’t provide useful advice, Rinne says, but the skills we lose when we rely too much on it.
“The danger is that we don’t develop these critical skills that we can use yet, because we don’t know how to use emotional intelligence, if AI navigates with emotional intelligence for us,” said Rinne.
Skillsoft uses and sells AI tools to their customers, but their tools aim to train people how to have real-world conversations. Its product, CAISY, allows people to practice having conversations and giving feedback, before having important work conversations.
Instead of saying “here’s the answer, here’s what to say,” says Rinne, AI instead teaches the person how to improve those innate skills. “I actually developed my ability to navigate a difficult conversation or navigate a client conversation because I got used to it,”
Paying the price for cutting middle management
AI is not the cause of the problem, but instead of leadership, Rinne said. As organizations have streamlined their organizational structures and cut out middle managers, coaching and training have fallen by the wayside.
A good example of this strategy is Meta, which has cut 25,000 jobs from 2022 and affects the AI team with one manager for every 50 engineers. Traditionally, the 25-to-1 employee-to-boss ratio is often seen as the outer limit of the so-called span-of-control scale, but the company is going all-in on AI. With AI, some organizations are pushing the limits of management.
The recent uptick in youth hiring appears to be a common, similar approach taken by Cognizant, an IT company that has more than 350,000 employees worldwide on its site, and is on a hiring spree.
“If you can equip these people with AI, you have more knowledge. You put the technology in your hands. So you can have more entry programs, and you can make more graduates and get them to professionals faster,” said Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S. Good luck earlier this year. Although it flattens the job pyramid, “the asymmetry will not come from technology. It will come from skills in different fields,” he said.
Rinne sees the opposite from an organizational perspective as fewer managers can lead to faster decisions and more autonomy. However, managers still need to turn strategy into results and results, develop talent, and hold the team together,
“There is a danger that organizations will start treating leadership time as if it is a problem of statistics, when this is a problem of ability,” he said.
While other generations have had decades to learn how to deal with change and the organizational power that comes with change, now “young people are coming into the workforce, and they’ve just been thrown in,” explains Rinne.
Some have blamed the struggle of young workers to navigate the generally unsocial workplace. They’re dating and not getting along, and Tessa West, a psychology professor at New York University whose research focuses on employee-management relationships, says that’s hampering their ability to function at work.
“You learn a lot of skills from those young relationships that you use at work,” said West. “Negotiation is a big thing, and so is compromise.”
Even a romantic relationship can’t bridge the gap that Rinne sees between employees and their bosses. He points to his future experiences as helping him prepare for his current role as an organizational leader.
“I had good opportunities for training and money for my development,” he said. “The difference with that is you have Gen Z coming in, and I think there’s this perception of the digital baby, that they’re already ready for the pace of change, or they’re already ready to navigate.”
But leaders aren’t really equipping young workers to adapt, communicate effectively, and have good judgment, he said, which undermines their competitive advantage when human-centered skills drive success in the AI era.
“We expect them to go into this crazy storm and be able to navigate it the right way,” he said.
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on March 28, 2026.
