Work

AI is making a mess of how humans interact at work

Published Thu, Aug 20 202612:30 PM EDT,Updated 29 Min Ago

By Jennifer Liu

Illustration: Alisa Stern; Amnaj Khetsamtip, Maria Bobrova / iStock / Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

Somewhere in Chicago, one 40-year-old project director spent her summer wondering if she’s been working with a human or a bot.

She was recently put on a project with an artificial intelligence expert who started using AI agents to manage his inbox. But in the course of their partnership, the bots began filtering out important emails and texts, leading to delays delivering on promises to their client and no other way to reach him, the project director tells CNBC Make It.

Now, despite previously being in touch over phone and video calls, she says her team can’t reach the AI expert to honor their contract and pay him for the finished work. “I actually looked up their local speaking engagements to see if I could just go maybe meet them,” the project director says. At this point, she’s second-guessing whether he’s even a real human.

“I will take a messy human over a robot any day,” she says. “How do I get through to a machine?”

Welcome to the age of AI weirdness at work.

AI is reshaping jobs, businesses and, if tech bosses’ predictions come true, the future of the entire workforce. Talks of an uncertain AI-powered future aside, the developing tech is also creating a mess of how humans interact in the workplace right now. People are passing off work slop to their colleagues, accusing each other of lazy AI use, picking fights over who’s smarter than AI and punting questions from their direct reports.

For this article, CNBC Make It reached out to over a dozen employees and business leaders to take a closer look at the frustration brewing among workers, some of whom declined to be identified for fear of professional repercussions. The picture that unfolds is messy, awkward and, in the case of the missing AI expert, downright strange.

AI is making coworkers suspicious of everyone else

Since generative AI burst onto the scene in 2022 with the public launch of ChatGPT, people have generally been left to their own devices to experiment with AI.

Today, roughly half of workers say they use AI anywhere from once a week up to multiple times per day, according to the CNBC and SurveyMonkey Quarterly AI and Jobs Survey published Thursday. However, a majority, 84%, of people say they’re self-taught with no formal training in AI, and 55% say their workplace doesn’t have an official AI policy, per the survey of 1,686 workers.

Is that what you believe, or is that what Claude told you? — copy writer in chicago

Workers are getting mixed messages from every direction of their orgs about how, when and why to AI: Their boss may encourage them to use it to work faster, better and smarter, while peers side-eye them for taking a shortcut or question whether they’re actually doing the work.

That was Joanna Briggs’ concern when a colleague complimented an email the 30-year-old HR worker in London had sent, then immediately followed up by asking whether she’d used ChatGPT on it.

Briggs, who says she researched and crafted the message without the help of AI, took it as a backhanded compliment. “It kind of just puts your back up a bit, and you think, ‘No, I really worked on this,’ and you want the credit. You want your skill to be recognized,” she says, adding that her snap response came from feeling like her hard-earned skills were reduced to being able to prompt an AI tool reasonably well.

Read more: AI is making a mess of how humans interact at work – CNBC

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