Have you ever treated your AI tool as a colleague—by saying “please,” “thank you,” or “good job”? Some people anthropomorphize their AI tools, implicitly treating them as digital colleagues. This raises questions for companies: What constitutes a digital colleague, and how should digital colleagues be managed?
In our discussions with senior leaders, we have heard how AI—particularly agentic AI—is becoming more embedded into many companies’ operations: Digital colleagues are being added to human teams, managing the work of other digital colleagues, and sometimes managing human colleagues.
In this study, we will explore how these companies are integrating digital colleagues into their work, and how this is changing company performance, processes, relationships, and structure. We will create a set of working groups, each including 5–10 participants. Group members, as well as other leaders in each company, will complete a short survey and participate in a 45-minute interview about what it means to have digital colleagues and best practices for dealing with them.
Research questions will include:
- How are top-performing companies working with digital colleagues, and which early use cases are showing success?
- What organizational changes are needed to maximize value from digital colleagues?
- How do companies using digital colleagues need to redesign jobs?
- What is the impact of digital colleagues on productivity, pricing, training, and hiring?
- What governance approaches for working with digital colleagues are best?
SEEKING: We are seeking participation in the research from companies that have actively developed digital colleagues and have experiences they can share.
CONTACT: Stephanie L. Woerner
