By Natalie Runyon
Excessive and unchecked use of AI in the workplace risks eroding human connection, cognitive skills, and employee well-being, requiring that organizations adopt a balanced, human-centered approach to AI integration.
Key insights:
- Unchecked AI use in the workplace can erode human connection and well-being. Excessive reliance on AI risks weakening interpersonal relationships, social bonds, and employee well-being, as people may increasingly interact with AI rather than colleagues, leading to a loss of meaning and purpose at work.
- Overuse of AI threatens cognitive skills and learning. When employees delegate too many tasks to AI, they risk cognitive decline, reduced brain plasticity, and diminished expertise, as continuous AI adoption can lead to less engagement, critical thinking, and learning opportunities.
- Organizations must adopt a balanced, human-centered approach to AI integration. To maximize AI’s benefits without harming talent, companies should pursue hybrid intelligence that combines human and algorithmic literacy and prioritizes both technology and talent in their strategies.
The above prediction has monumental implications because it could weaken the human-to-human emotional muscles, especially in the workplace. While AI promises efficiency and productivity gains, unchecked adoption without preserving human connection threatens employee psychology, organizational performance, and our fundamental humanity, according to Dr. Cornelia C. Walther, a leading voice on AI's societal impacts and a visiting scholar at the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative and the Harvard Learning and Innovation Lab.
AI's potential for erosion of workplace connection
By replacing human effort and relationships at work with automated convenience and machine companionship, we could see the rapid flood of AI tools overwhelm workplaces, a cognitive decline among employees, and loss of learning opportunities. All of these, and more, are consequences of pervasive AI use within companies.
Weakening workplace well-being as AI companionship increases. The ubiquitous use of AI and the rise of AI companionships give rise to the likelihood that employee well-being, and collective organizational well-being, could suffer because of depleting interpersonal skills and a loss of social bonds at work. The Harvard Longitudinal Study identified social connection and meaning as the two prime factors for longevity and well-being. Equally, because so much of our time is spent working, employees derive significant purpose for their lives from their work.
Additionally, many individuals could soon realize that human friendships at work are no longer necessary because AI is an entity that is always agreeable, friendly, patient, and accessible. Indeed, this reality makes it easier to interact with AI rather than navigating workplace relationships where complexity, competition, negotiation, personality variations, and unknowns are the norms.
Workplaces can be overwhelmed by accelerating AI implementation. The rapid, continuous introduction of multiple AI tools is creating pressure for many employees, and the expectations of rapid AI adoption combined with the cost of continuous change appears to be leading to stress and a feeling of being overwhelmed in the workplace. In fact, the EY 2025 Work Reimagined Survey, which gathered insights from 15,000 employees and 1,500 employers across 29 countries, indicated that 64% of employees report a perceived increase in workloads over the past year, yet only 5% are maximizing AI to transform their work.
"Unknowingly, we are sliding down the slippery slope of agency decay,” explains Dr. Walther. “Moving beyond the experimentation with AI, we are deeply into the stage of integrating it, which takes us ever closer to reliance on AI. The time to invest in agency amid AI is now, before we no longer notice what we have lost. There is no longer just one big thing, but that it has become this maze of innovations popping in one after the other, which leads to the fact that people feel constantly overwhelmed." This constant deluge of new tools has created a dangerous paradox of being trapped between corporate mandates and competitive pressure.
Excessive AI depletes employee cognitive skills. It is proven that brain plasticity, or the brain’s ability to change by creating connections between nerve cells, is necessary to maintain and improve cognitive function. Thus, as an employee learns to do new things, that individual’s abilities grow. On the flip side, however, when you stop using these skills, those neural connections weaken.
In this context, employees have voiced concern about the impact of using AI too often or to too great an extent. Indeed, one major consequence of cognitive decay is the weakening of the brain’s capacity to engage deeply, question systematically, and — somewhat ironically — resist the potential manipulation of AI.
The concern is real. According to EY research, 37% of employees surveyed say they worry that overreliance on AI could erode their skills and expertise.
More broadly, extensive use of AI tools may hinder learning and over time, lead to declining cognitive function. "Most recently, a student from China reach out to me saying, ‘I am scared. I feel my brain fading away. I know I'm no longer learning, but I have no other choice but to keep up with my assignments because everybody is using AI," notes Dr. Walther.
AI overuse threatens employee purpose and engagement. The ripple effects of mindless AI adoption extend far beyond individual workers and create compounding damage at every organizational level. At the individual level, Dr. Walther explains that, “walking the path of least resistance is dangerous in a hybrid world; in contact with AI systems that are configured to address our smallest needs, the human affinity toward minimal effort is dangerous.
“Delegating tasks to AI, without critical thought to inputs, nor careful review of outputs is gradually turning us into cognitive factory workers. We produce ever faster, ever more, apparently ever more refined deliverables — but we feel neither ownership, nor pride for the final creation.”
This industrial-era mentality brings two critical consequences. First, workers who do not care about the whole are apathetic and rarely give their best. Second, and more fundamentally, people need meaning at work and outside of work. “Employees at work flourish if they are doing something that matters, but it makes thriving hard when team members cannot take pride in work when the majority of tasks are offloaded to AI,” says Dr. Walther. Indeed, MIT research shows that employees having a sense of meaning in their work matters more than any other job factor, including pay and benefits, promotion opportunities, or working conditions.
A framework for human-centered AI integration
To maximize the efficiency of AI without exacerbating the risks of AI overuse, the solution is not rejecting AI but fundamentally reimagining how AI tools are integrated. Dr. Walther proposes that companies adopt hybrid intelligence, which is a combination of human literacy and algorithmic literacy that must be cultivated from kindergarten through retirement.
Dr. Walther’s Pro-Social AI Index is a practical assessment framework to help strike the balance. The 4T methodology says AI needs to be tailored, trained, tested, and targeted to bring out the best in people while minimizing its impact on planet. In addition, it serves dual purposes by assessing existing tools and raising awareness to "change how we think about the systems that we're mainstreaming."
Guidance for company leadership
For C-level executives, Dr. Walther urges them to pursue two critical mindset shifts around AI. First, company executives need to move beyond binary thinking in prioritizing AI over humans or vice versa. Instead, it is necessary to achieve hybrid intelligence and determine how the human-AI partnership can best be harnessed, with deliberate space for human thought, creativity, and quirkiness.
Second, Dr. Walther advises that C-suite leaders rethink the traditional return on investment (ROI) calculation to determine the successful utility of AI. The ROI of AI investments is important, but equally so is the underlying human components in the return on values. What this means is focusing more on why the human-AI partnership matters and less about what AI does, explains Dr. Walther.
To put this hybrid intelligence into work, it is necessary for companies to prioritize both the technology and the talent components of AI integration. Sacrificing the latter can erode gains in efficiency from AI, according to EY research. More specifically, EY’s call for increased investments in culture and more effective learning and reward alignments mirrors what the Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals 2025 report revealed about the AI Success Pyramid and how to drive and implement enterprise AI adoption.
As AI becomes woven into every aspect of professional work, the opportunity for companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors by employing their unique AI-humanity approach can become a strategic advantage. While the efficiency gains and productivity promise of AI are real, those organizations implementing AI still need to leverage the irreplaceable value of human connection, cognitive growth, and meaningful work to maximize AI performance and ROI.
