The rise of ‘social offloading’—when AI replaces your boss’s empathy

Stop if you’ve heard this one before: an employee received a message from her boss and didn’t quite understand its meaning, suspecting it was written by AI. So, the employee asked an AI tool to interpret the message for her. The AI responded and then asked if she wanted a draft response back to her boss.

The employee paused. “‘I literally think [my boss’] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,’” the employee told Leena Rinne, vice president of leadership, business, and coaching at Skillsoft, an edtech and skills management platform. The employee told her, “‘I can’t crack the code of working with [my boss], because it’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.’” 

Rinne calls this phenomenon “socially offloading”: when interpersonal skills that require human judgement, empathy, or courage gets outsourced to AI.  It’s similar to “cognitive offloading,” or shifting often menial tasks to technology like AI to reduce mental effort, and has the potential to disrupt workplace culture. 

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.

“If I’m always asking AI how do I respond to my boss,” Rinne told Fortune, “I don’t actually learn how to engage with my boss. I don’t actually learn how to build a relationship with my boss.”

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 analysis of AI usage patterns. The problem is not that AI doesn’t give helpful advice, Rinne said, but the skills we lose when we rely too much on it. 

“The risk is then that we don’t develop these critical skills that we can use in the moment, because we don’t know how to navigate emotional intelligence, if AI is navigating emotional intelligence for us,” Rinne said. 

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. 

Instead of “here’s the answer, here’s what you should say,” Rinne said, the AI instead teaches the person how to develop those intrapersonal skills. “I’m actually building my skill of navigating a difficult conversation or navigating a client conversation because I’ve had the practice,” 

Paying the price of cutting middle management 

AI isn’t 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. 

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. 

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. 

“If you can equip these people with AI, you have commoditized expertise. You’ve 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,” Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S told Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn earlier this year. While it does flatten the workplace pyramid, “the asymmetry is not going to come from expertise. It’s going to come from interdisciplinary skills,” he said. 

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. 

“There’s a risk that organizations start treating the span of a leadership’s role like it’s a math problem, when this is really a capability problem,” she said.

While other generations have had decades to learn how to navigate change and the organizational dynamics that come with change, now “young people enter the workforce, and they’re just thrown into the deep end,” Rinne explained.

Some have blamed young workers’ struggle to navigate the workplace on being generally less social. They’re 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. 

“You learn a lot of skills in those early relationships that you then leverage in the workplace,” West said. “Negotiation is a huge one, and so is compromise.”

Even romantic relationships can’t 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’s leader. 

“I’ve had amazing opportunities to be coached and to have investment in my development,” she said. “The contrast of that is you’ve got Gen Z coming in, and I think there’s this assumption as a digital child, that they are already ready for the pace of change, or they’re already ready to navigate.” 

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. 

“We’re just kind of expecting them to enter this crazy whirlwind moment and be able to navigate it effectively,” she said. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com