Does AI Change Why We Want to Work?
Best-selling author Dan Goleman asks how people's feelings about work will change if AI provides all the answers on the job.
Daniel Goleman is author of the international best-seller Emotional Intelligence and Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. He is a regular contributor to Korn Ferry.
For a very long time, and particularly for those happiest in their jobs, work has met needs that have little to do with a paycheck.
It gives many people a sense of purpose and competence. It gives them a place where their knowledge matters, where others rely on them, and where contribution and belonging become part of everyday life. We have colleagues who recognize us, people who challenge us, and sometimes a leader or mentor who helps us make sense of what is happening when we can’t quite make sense of it ourselves.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to challenge some of these things, in some cases by supplementing them and in others by reducing the need for them altogether.
As more people use AI to prepare for difficult conversations, think through career decisions, make sense of complicated information, ask for feedback, practice presentations, and process emotionally charged situations, AI starts to occupy territory that was once more exclusively human. It becomes a coach, thought partner, sounding board, and even a source of reassurance.
There is plenty to debate about whether this is good or bad. A more interesting question is what happens when the place we go to meet very human needs is no longer another human.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, offers something to think about. Decades of research have found that people tend to be more motivated and function better when three basic psychological needs are supported: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When these needs are consistently thwarted within a social environment, well-being and motivation suffer.
This applies across families, classrooms, teams, organizations, and cultures.
Performance, persistence, creativity, and motivation all depend in part on how much autonomy, competence, and relatedness people experience in their day-to-day lives. It’s tempting to ask whether AI can satisfy these needs in new ways. Sometimes, perhaps, it can. But the more interesting possibility is that AI changes how we satisfy them, and where we go to do so.
Start with competence. For many people, expertise is more than a collection of skills—it becomes part of identity, central to who they understand themselves to be. If a tool can suddenly complete in seconds something that took someone years to learn, the emotional response is unlikely to be simple or short-lived.
The questions become quite personal: What am I good at now? Where do I add value? Am I still needed?
In these moments, failure to adopt AI has very little to do with resistance to technology. On a deeper level, it’s closer to an existential fear of erasure.
Autonomy is another need that technology can simultaneously support and undermine. AI can be liberating because it gives people more capacity, access, and choice. But someone else may experience the same technology as something being imposed on them, especially when decisions about how they work, what they are expected to produce, or how quickly they should produce it are increasingly made elsewhere.
Relatedness is a whole other can of worms. Once, when someone had a difficult conversation ahead of them, they may have called a colleague, a friend, or a mentor. Now they may open a chatbot. The move to technology has some obvious advantages: the bot is available at 2 a.m., doesn’t get impatient, and can help organize a messy thought or offer new language when words are hard to find. It can also provide a private place to think before bringing something into a relationship or conversation.
But working something out with AI is distinctly different from working it out with another person. Being told by a machine that your idea makes sense is different from having someone whose judgment matters look at you and say, "I think you're onto something." Because of the way LLMs are designed to respond to us, we may even have a genuine felt sense of being understood, known, or witnessed. What is missing is the embodied experience of belonging that happens between people, when someone meets us with recognition, empathy, agreement, or even simply stays with us in an experience. That feeling of being part of something larger than ourselves, of being among our people, is hard to reproduce outside of a relationship.
The distinctions are important. In general, emotional responses tell us a lot about the deeper needs of our subconscious. Anxiety may reflect a threatened sense of security or competence, while resistance may signal a loss of autonomy, identity, or control. Enthusiasm, meanwhile, can accompany growth, mastery, possibility, or relief.
Emotional intelligence gives leaders a way to listen for what sits underneath the reaction. Instead of seeing reluctance around AI as a problem to overcome, a leader can become curious about what might be at stake for the person experiencing it. Someone who has spent twenty years developing expertise may be wondering what that expertise now means. A manager asked to automate part of their team's work may be thinking about contribution, responsibility, or the future of people they care about. Someone eager to adopt AI may be responding to a genuine sense of possibility, or they may be responding to a fear of being left behind.
Organizations can use AI to remove tedious work and give people more room to think, create, and contribute. They can also use it in ways that slowly remove some of the experiences that made work meaningful in the first place: being needed, developing mastery, figuring something out together, or knowing that another person sees the value of what you bring.
The more AI enters those spaces, the more deliberate leaders will need to be about what they want work to continue providing. Or rather, if work isn’t providing what it used to, how is it going to provide something newly motivational instead?
Something critical to keep in mind here is that human needs don’t tend to change at the pace of technology.
Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon
Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.
