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Stop if you\u2019ve heard this one before: An employee received a message from her boss and didn\u2019t quite understand its meaning. Suspecting it was written by AI, the employee asked her AI tool to interpret the message. The AI responded and then asked if she wanted a draft response back to her boss.<\/p>\n
The employee paused. \u201c\u2018I literally think [my boss\u2019] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,\u2019\u201d the employee told Leena Rinne, vice president of leadership, business, and coaching at Skillsoft, an edtech and skills management platform. She told Rinne, \u201c\u2018I can\u2019t crack the code of working with [my boss], because it\u2019s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rinne calls this phenomenon \u201csocially offloading,\u201d or when interpersonal skills that require human judgement, empathy, or courage gets outsourced to AI.\u00a0 It\u2019s similar to \u201ccognitive offloading,\u201d or shifting often menial tasks to technology like AI to reduce mental effort, and has the potential to disrupt workplace culture.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Social offloading can look like a boss is preparing for a performance review and asking AI how to have the conversation. Or, it could be an employee asking to craft a response to a stressful email from a manager.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I\u2019m always asking AI how do I respond to my boss,\u201d Rinne told Fortune, <\/em>\u201cI don\u2019t actually learn how to engage with my boss. I don\u2019t actually learn how to build a relationship with my boss.\u201d<\/p>\n Humans are increasingly using AI in more human ways, with the most common use being for therapy and companionship, according to a Harvard Business Review<\/em> analysis of AI usage patterns. The problem is not that AI doesn\u2019t give helpful advice, Rinne said, but the skills we lose when we rely too much on it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe risk is then that we don\u2019t develop these critical skills that we can use in the moment, because we don\u2019t know how to navigate emotional intelligence, if AI is navigating emotional intelligence for us,\u201d Rinne said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Skillsoft uses and sells AI tools to their customers, but their tools aim to coach people through how to have real-world conversations. Its product, CAISY, allows people to practice having conversations and provides feedback, before they have important work conversations.\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead of \u201chere\u2019s the answer, here\u2019s what you should say,\u201d Rinne said, the AI instead teaches the person how to develop those intrapersonal skills. \u201cI\u2019m actually building my skill of navigating a difficult conversation or navigating a client conversation because I\u2019ve had the practice,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n AI isn\u2019t the cause of the problem, but rather a leadership vacuum, Rinne said. As organizations have flattened their organizational structures and cut out middle managers, mentorship and coaching have fallen by the wayside.\u00a0<\/p>\n A prime example of this strategy is Meta, which has cut 25,000 jobs since 2022 and touts an AI team that has one boss for every 50 engineers. Traditionally, a 25-to-1 employee-to-boss ratio is usually seen as the outer limit of the so-called span?of?control scale, but the company is going all-in on AI. With AI, some organizations are pushing the limits of management.\u00a0<\/p>\n The recent uptick in younger hires seems to be a common approach, similarly taken by Cognizant, an IT consulting firm that boasts more than 350,000 employees globally on their site, and is on an entry-level hiring spree.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf you can equip these people with AI, you have commoditized expertise. You\u2019ve handed over expertise on the fingertips. So you could have more entry-level programs, and you could do more school graduates and take them to expertise faster,\u201d Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S told Fortune<\/em> earlier this year. While it does flatten the workplace pyramid, \u201cthe asymmetry is not going to come from expertise. It\u2019s going to come from interdisciplinary skills,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rinne sees the upside from an organizational perspective as fewer managers can lead to quicker decisions and more autonomy. However, managers are still needed to turn strategy into results and into execution, develop talent, and hold a team together, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a risk that organizations start treating the span of a leadership\u2019s role like it\u2019s a math problem, when this is really a capability problem,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n While other generations have had decades to learn how to navigate change and the organizational dynamics that come with change, now \u201cyoung people enter the workforce, and they\u2019re just thrown into the deep end,\u201d Rinne explained.<\/p>\n Some have blamed young workers\u2019 struggle to navigate the workplace on being generally less social. They\u2019re dating and socializing less, and Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University whose research focuses on communication between employees and bosses, says that is affecting their ability to perform at work.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou learn a lot of skills in those early relationships that you then leverage in the workplace,\u201d West said. \u201cNegotiation is a huge one, and so is compromise.\u201d<\/p>\n Even romantic relationships can\u2019t fill the gap Rinne sees forming between employees and their bosses. She points to her own experience coming up as helping her prepare for her current role as an organization\u2019s leader.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve had amazing opportunities to be coached and to have investment in my development,\u201d she said. \u201cThe contrast of that is you\u2019ve got Gen Z coming in, and I think there\u2019s this assumption as a digital child, that they are already ready for the pace of change, or they\u2019re already ready to navigate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But leaders are not actually equipping younger employees to navigate change, communicate effectively, and have good judgment, she said, which lowers their competitive advantage when human-centric skills are driving success in the AI era.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re just kind of expecting them to enter this crazy whirlwind moment and be able to navigate it effectively,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on March 28, 2026.<\/em><\/p>\n #social #offloading #erodes #work #relationships<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stop if you\u2019ve heard this one before: An employee received a message from her boss and didn\u2019t quite understand its meaning. Suspecting it was written by AI, the employee asked… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10629,11587,427,567,400,12233,12234,566,587,565,1105,1890],"class_list":["post-10429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-communication","tag-erodes","tag-evergreen-refresh","tag-management","tag-meta","tag-offloading","tag-relationships","tag-retention","tag-social","tag-talent-acquisition","tag-work","tag-workforce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Paying the price of cutting middle management\u00a0<\/h2>\n
More on AI in the workplace:<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n