reworked: Should We Call AI a Coworker?

Kathryn Greenizen, our Director of Innovation and Systems Design, was featured in reworked. An excerpt is below. Click here to read the full article.

The Problem With Calling AI a 'Teamplayer'

"AI agents aren't colleagues. They're instrumentation," said Diptamay Sanyal, principal engineer at CrowdStrike, who has built these platforms at both HubSpot and CrowdStrike. "The 'coworker' framing is convenient marketing that obscures a fundamental reality. These systems were deployed by someone with objectives that may have nothing to do with the team they're operating in."

That someone could be IT, HR, a line manager or a vendor whose business model depends on engagement data. What stays constant across all those scenarios is the directionality, Sanyal said. "The team is the subject, not the beneficiary." The language of collaboration is dressing up something more one-sided.

The problem is more basic, said Kathryn Greenizen, director of strategic innovation and systems design at FLEX Partner. "The moment we start asking who an AI is 'loyal' to, we've already designed the system incorrectly,” she said.  AI is a tool and treating it as anything else creates misplaced trust that leads organizations to remove humans from the loop in the name of efficiency.