AI Tools in the Workplace: Good or Bad for Our Conversations?

Is it a superpower or a stumbling block? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing in the office. Everyone knows about Chat-GPT, but generative AI for images and videos is also on the rise. Initially seen as standalone AI tools, we now observe business software platforms catching up. Microsoft Teams launched Copilot, Zoom introduced AI Companion, and Google dropped Gemini into the Google Workspace. Each are smart assistants that take notes, summarize, translate, and automate tasks.

For you as a manager, it’s intriguing because you want your team to work smarter, not harder. However, with all these technical gadgets, the question arises: does AI enhance your team, or does it press down on collaboration and conversations in the workplace?

Fortunately, the answer is not black and white, as research on team dynamics shows. AI can indeed boost your team, but how effective it is depends largely on how you, as a leader in the organization, handle this technology. Remember, no matter how intelligent AI is, human skills—soft skills—remain indispensable.

The Pros of AI in Your Team

AI can have a hugely positive impact in the workplace, especially regarding productivity. You can delegate and outsource many tasks to an AI assistant. After all, the more data you feed the AI, the more accurate and tailored the output becomes. Practically, we are already seeing the benefits:

• More efficient meetings because AI takes notes and formulates action items.
• Greater engagement with work as AI takes on peripheral tasks, allowing colleagues to focus on what matters.
• Better collaborating teams because AI, for example, recognizes patterns of when team members are at their best, thus assigning tasks accordingly.

The Cons of AI Tools

However, by giving AI access to all facets of work, including all conversations held, there are also several risks you, as leadership, want to consider.

Written words can be intimidating

Colleagues may be less inclined to speak up. If your words are recorded and analyzed, it can be daunting. Something written down can come across differently than how your colleague conveyed it during the meeting.

Interpreting sentiment is a skill

Sentiment in verbal and non-verbal signals is difficult for an AI to interpret and isn’t always picked up correctly. Frowning your eyebrows or the well-known “yes, but” are prime examples of disagreement. They are also used to indicate that you are thinking or probing a subject. An AI is functionally oriented and will never be able to read nuances as well as a human.

Speaking time is not for everyone

This further results in dominant personalities having more opportunities to claim the spotlight. While this can also be analyzed and thus proven with AI, AI does not take into account why someone remains quiet during a meeting. Is that colleague there for an update? Is there a hierarchical culture? Is it simply not the time or place for a critical question? For such an interpretation, you must not look to AI, but to people.

You still need to think it through

Moreover, we see that team members think less creatively. AI is powerful in automating tasks, but our brain is also hard-wired to take the shortest route to results. Unfortunately, it happens increasingly that employees blindly accept AI results skipping the work of thinking through for themselves and making connections. This can lead to missed insights and less exploration outside the beaten paths, which could otherwise help the organization advance.

The Impact of AI Tools on Organizational Culture

As a leader, you want to make the technology work for your organization. However, the consequence might be that impactful conversations take place offline, outside the AI’s working field, or that acting occurs in meetings and conversations.

If your people lack trust in AI or how the organization substantiates decisions with such tooling, they will tend to withdraw or only exhibit desired behaviors. And that turns a healthy organizational culture on its head faster than you can say “artificial intelligence”.

Why ‘Soft Skills’ Are Now More Important Than Ever

That brings us back to soft skills, the qualities that make work so human. Soft skills help to create and maintain an open culture. Especially when you employ AI to make work smarter, you must continue to actively pay attention to your employees, their drive, their engagement, their job satisfaction, and how you integrate all of this into a pleasant and safe culture where everyone can find their place.

Psychological safety in the workplace is not achieved by having AI analyze your conversations, but rather by having those conversations facilitated by a human. The AI assistant can functionally explain what the meeting was about, but cannot empathize with a colleague who is afraid of being perceived as a complainer. To identify and discuss this, you always need a human. But it’s also two sides of the same coin: a well-guided meeting is all the better summarized by an AI.

So, What Should You Do with AI in the Workplace?

AI is a powerful tool that can help your team work smarter and more efficiently. But don’t forget that human leadership and soft skills are the indispensable ingredients for a successful team in the AI era. By strategically deploying AI in the workplace and focusing on the human side of work, you create the organization and teams that are ready for the future.

To ensure AI has a positive impact on your team, it is important to use it carefully. Here are a few tips:

1. Involve your team in the implementation of AI tools

Discuss with your team members what benefits you want to achieve with AI. When will you use it and when not? How will it affect your work? What about company-sensitive information? Discuss both the hard side—tasks, processes, peripheral issues—and the soft side—collaboration, interpretation, and open communication. A bonus tip: capture this in an ‘AI Code of Conduct’, which is available to colleagues at all times.

2. Give your team members the opportunity to learn about AI

There are plenty of online and offline trainings available about AI. So once you’ve chosen your AI assistant, make sure your employees are intimately familiar with the tool and its functionalities. Additionally, a crash course in ‘prompting’ is always a good idea. While you have a lot of computing power at your disposal with AI, a tool can’t sense what you mean by the barest of commands.

3. Use AI to strengthen the human aspect of work

AI helps you analyze and recognize patterns. Examine this information critically (keeping in mind what AI can and, more importantly, cannot do) to gain new insights. Combine the insights with powerful conversation tactics like Crucial Conversations or Situational Leadership, and you have a strong foundation to coach your team members, provide feedback, and develop a joint vision.

For this article, we have used generative AI 🦾.