“If frictionless AI can pull people away from friends and family, it’s not hard to see how it edges out a colleague. Part of what makes this a slippery slope is that using AI can be convenient, powerful, and effective. People are busy and unpredictable. Colleagues demand patience and care.” – From Team Dynamics Weaken When Employees Turn to AI Instead of Colleagues
Libraries are people, in the sense that the collective actions of library workers make the library in which they work function. Every action or decision, stacked upon each other, makes up the library’s mission, vision, and values. I believe deeply that this work is deeply collaborative, and this is the work that excites me most. I am, at heart, a booster for the human-centered library.
The work I have done in my career of which I am the proudest has been collaborative. I worked with colleagues to develop and deploy an equity challenge for employees as a library where I worked. I facilitated a year-long change management process that brought together leaders from within the library where I worked to think about how the library could grow and change to meet the emerging needs of campus. I coordinated a team that created policies, procedures, and a shared calendaring system for a set of Zoom pods that were deployed at several library locations for students to use for taking virtual tests or participating in virtual interviews. I created and deployed a campus-wide library user survey, working with colleagues to promote the survey and deliver survey completion incentives. I oversaw the development of the inclusive excellence plan for the library where I worked, coordinating the development of goals, key performance indicators, and annual targets.
I share this list because I want you to understand that I walk the talk. Every single thing on this list was made better through collaboration with colleagues. And my experience has been that the special sauce in this work is that we are better together than we are on our own because each member of a team brings a wealth of knowledge, skills, and lived experience to every project.
The article that the quote at the top of the post presents research that suggests that the widespread adoption of AI tools causes an erosion of trust within a team environment. This isn’t a post about the perils of AI adoption, and it isn’t meant to dissuade you from implementing AI tools as part of your workflows if that suits you or your work. You’re wise enough to understand what is best for you and for your teams. This is a post about how the AI has the potential to break the human connection within teams and why I think that’s a problem.
The authors of the article I quoted from note that there is a growing tendency to turn to AI tools for assistance with tasks like workshopping ideas or getting feedback on a piece of writing. Tasks that, in earlier times, we might have asked a colleague to help us with. The authors name this tendency to turn to AI over a colleague: displacement. And the more you engage in displacement, the more trust and coordination erode in your team, something which the authors call “relationslipping.” The authors of this piece are quick to note that AI isn’t the problem here. The humans are. And they make the point in the quote I shared at the beginning that it’s tempting to engage in displacement because AI doesn’t require the same “patience and care” as your human colleagues do.
This tendency to turn to an AI tool for assistance is understandable. These tools are increasingly showing up in tools we are already using like our email clients, our word processing software, and our virtual meeting environments. They offer to help us write an email, make sense of a document we’ve been sent, or to transcribe a meeting. Beyond that, though, is a tendency to more actively engage with AI tools. We visit our favorite tool to understand an idea more fully, to gain knowledge on a topic, or to work interactively with the tool to develop some piece of work output.
Each act of disengagement seems small. But they add up to a loss of shared knowledge, shared values, and shared trust.
I think we choose displacement because we believe that even when AI does a worse job of helping us, it is easier to work with AI than it is to work with our colleagues. I’ll be honest here: humans are complex creatures with moods that are far less easy to control than an AI tool used in place of a colleague. I would be lying to you if I didn’t address the fact that working with people isn’t always easy. Our colleagues are grumpy sometimes. They find flaws in our ideas. They disagree with us in meetings. They sometimes speak without thinking, and their words sometimes sting.
But the flipside of this coin is that our colleagues have such a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and lived experience. And that complexity almost always makes it worth the effort of cultivating relationships at work. Our colleagues help us refine our ideas. They help us reconsider the parts of our thinking that suffer from the we’ve always done it that way mentality. And they bring with them ideas that we may never have considered, and which change the trajectory of our work in the best way possible.
This is not to suggest that we should accept everything our colleagues do that makes it difficult to work with them. We should not accept the toxic behaviors of our colleagues, and we should look to our organizational leaders to root out those toxic behaviors. Everyone deserves to feel safe at work, and not everything a person does can be filed under the complexity of the human experience.
But I do think that sometimes we are quick to think that going it alone will be easier than working collaboratively. Or we are quick to think that the capacity that an AI tool offers us to be more efficient or to streamline a workflow is a reasonable trade for eroding team trust. Heck, I don’t even know that we think about how AI tool usage impacts team dynamics.
Libraries are people. And the “patience and care” our colleagues require is based on respecting the knowledge, skills, and lived experience that they possess. Building better libraries starts by centering the people whose labor makes those libraries function and understanding how individuals in an organization can solve complex problems and build amazing solutions by working together. Collaboration helps us build better things than we ever could alone!
