When connection becomes optional
I’ve been thinking a lot about AI lately. Listening to podcasts and leaning in around what is possible in my practice.I am absolutely not an AI expert and have been bumbling along using it myself and learning each day for the last 18 months or so. As I spend my time thinking about how people work better together, I’m curious about what happens to people working together as AI becomes part of how we work.
There is so much opportunity in what AI can give us. It can make us faster, remove unnecessary work, help us analyse information, prepare, write, solve problems and find answers that might previously have taken hours.
The productivity opportunity is very real. A large workplace study by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond followed more than 5,000 customer support agents and found access to generative AI increased productivity by 15% on average. These are incredible results and part of the reason so many organisations and businesses are looking at how they can embed AI into their own teams.
I’m using AI and can see the value in it. I think we are only scratching the surface of what it will allow us to do. When working in my lane, I keep thinking about:
What happens when we no longer need another human to get the work done?
There was a time when if I didn’t know something, I had to ask someone. If I wanted to test an idea, I grabbed someone and talked it through. If I was stuck, I sought out another person. Sometimes that conversation gave me the answer I was looking for. Sometimes it took me somewhere completely different.
Increasingly, I can bypass that interaction altogether, which creates efficiency for sure. I’m just not convinced efficiency is the only thing we should be measuring in our teams.
Workday’s 2026 research into AI and human connection at work caught my attention for exactly this reason. It found 44% of the active AI users surveyed often or always chose AI because it completed tasks faster without challenging their ideas.
Without challenging their ideas.
When I sit across from another person, I’m not simply accessing what they know. I’m accessing who they are and the lived experience they bring with them. Through this, over my time in leadership I have discovered they might see something I don’t see. They might challenge me or notice that what I’m saying and what I actually seem to be feeling are two different things. They might share an experience that completely shifts my thinking, believe in something I’ve dismissed or, even more, believe in me when I’m not quite there yet myself.
These human exchanges can influence what happens next and we can’t always predict what that will be. This is the cool part.
We spend so much time in business trying to create certainty. We want predictable results, processes and growth. AI is going to become increasingly brilliant at helping us find patterns, make decisions and remove inefficiency.
I think this is all great and think we should let it. Anything that helps us do these things is brilliant. What I don’t want is for humans to become predictable along with it.
What happens to our thinking if we become increasingly optimised around getting to the most efficient answer?
Some of our best ideas come from the bits we couldn’t have predicted. Someone says something slightly ridiculous or somebody else challenges it. Another person brings an experience none of us have had and suddenly the conversation is somewhere completely different.
Through this, we influence each other’s thinking. We spark ideas, challenge assumptions and sometimes give someone else the courage to pursue something they might have dismissed on their own.
There is something wonderfully unpredictable about what can happen when humans come together. If we become so focused on finding the most efficient answer, we risk losing some of that. We might become incredibly productive... my thinking is we might also become incredibly beige.
To be clear, I am not suggesting we throw another meeting into our calendars for meetings’ sake. Nobody needs another meeting in their diary just so we can say we connected. We simply do not need to resist AI or manufacture human interaction for the sake of it.
The opportunity we have is so much bigger than that.
If AI gives us capacity back, what are we going to do with it?
Will we simply fill that capacity with more tasks, more output and more expectations? Or could we use some of it to become better at the things that happen between people?
Lifting our heads, noticing each other and asking a curious question about something. Then the big part... listening, challenging, staying curious and continuing a conversation where we don’t already know the answer.
Remembering at this point that so much of what we want from our people isn’t purely productivity based. Sales, innovation, customer relationships, courage, trust, discretionary effort, resilience, ideas and growth are deeply relational. These are all influenced by what happens between humans.
We can improve productivity without necessarily improving performance.
When I talk about connection, I don’t mean simply spending more time together or getting along. I mean being genuinely open to another human changing something in us. What we think or believe. What we are willing to question. What we might attempt together.
So as we continue to understand how we can optimise AI, I think creating human connection and working better together will need to become far more deliberate. The world we have now entered may mean connection is no longer required to complete a task, but whether we continue to choose it is up to us.
When we no longer need connection to get the work done, will we still choose it because of what becomes possible when humans come together?
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Research referenced:
Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey R. Raymond, Generative AI at Work, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025.
Workday, AI Makes Work Easier. We Make It Human., Human Connection Workplace Index, 2026.
