Is AI Making Things Too Easy?
Best-selling author Dan Goleman argues why workers might need some of the “friction” that AI can eliminate.
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.
A new professional networking app called Clockout reportedly raised $3.5 million by trying to solve a problem that would have sounded strange a generation ago: Young professionals are struggling to meet one another.
In the era of remote work and AI takeover, the app is designed to help people find nearby professionals, communities, and events, with the explicit goal of moving connections offline and out of the digital world. (Minus the app, of course, which is step one.) Its founder, Krishna Dosapati, has highlighted the difficulty young people face these days in building professional communities off screen. The concern is backed by survey data which found that 22%, or roughly 1 in 5, employees under 35 experienced loneliness in 2025. Among Americans ages 18 to 29, 29% reported significant daily loneliness.
This is why the former US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, made the "loneliness epidemic" and its impact on health a central focus of his work.
At the same time, AI is beginning to change another part of the equation: how much we need one another at work. Someone who once might have leaned over to a colleague with a question can now ask a robot, maybe even their personal agent. In fact, employees can use AI to understand an unfamiliar concept, brainstorm an idea, prepare a presentation, draft a difficult email, or figure out how to approach a problem without involving another person at all.
In many ways, this is useful. But some of the interactions AI removes have historically done more than transfer information. They are also where we learn how to work with people.
Emotional intelligence develops, in part, through small encounters. When another person frustrates or challenges us and we have to notice our reaction, we become more self-aware. When we have to tolerate disagreement, impatience, uncertainty, or embarrassment, we have to practice emotional balance and a level of self-control. When we try to understand a perspective that does not neatly conform to our own, we flex out empathy muscle. And, by asking for help, repairing misunderstandings, giving feedback, navigating conflict, and figuring out how to get something done with another human being, we learn the essential skills of collaboration and relationship building.
Increasingly, AI allows us to bypass this relational friction.
New research from Workday suggests that younger employees are already noticing the effect. One in five Gen Z workers surveyed said they had become lonelier since AI tools entered the workplace, and more than 20% said AI had made their relationships with colleagues worse.
One manager interviewed by Workday put it this way: "AI didn't really kill small talk. It killed the dumb question."
But “dumb questions,” however much we complain about them, matter. A junior employee asking how something works might not only generate an answer, but also initiate an entire conversation about how a project fits together, why a particular decision was made, or how a more experienced colleague approaches things. They might even learn something about prioritization and critical thinking. Without an AI answer available at the ready, those questions can generate a lot more than we give them credit for.
While asking an AI system can feel psychologically safer than asking a colleague a question that might make us look uninformed, there is a benefit to taking the risk and asking what we fear might be obvious. Research from the Academy of Management found that frequent interaction with AI assistants may reduce what researchers call "image threat," the concern that we will be judged negatively by others. But the same study also found that frequent AI interaction can also reduce team belonging, with consequences for wellbeing, performance, and turnover intentions. Coworker support helped mitigate some of those effects.
This presents leaders with a more complicated problem than whether employees are using too much AI.
As these tools become more capable, many of the interactions that once happened because they were necessary become optional. Leaders may therefore have to become much more deliberate about creating the conditions for people to learn together.
That could mean many things – like protecting apprenticeship and mentoring rather than assuming AI can replace them or solving certain problems together even when an AI system could generate an answer faster. It could mean creating space for younger employees to ask questions, watch experienced colleagues think, disagree with people, and participate in conversations whose value can’t be measured by only efficiency.
The impulse to remove friction from work is old and understandable. This is why so much of what we call technological progress has been built around making things faster and easier.
But human development is all about friction. Other people misunderstand us, disagree, and come into work with competing needs and moods. They do not always respond immediately, nor do they always give us the answer we wanted. But part of becoming emotionally intelligent is learning how to remain present, curious, and constructive inside those moments. When developed, that emotional intelligence makes us capable of greater overall peace, calm and connection across the entire spectrum of our lives.
Organizations should be careful about what disappears alongside the adoption of AI.
If work removes too many opportunities to practice being with other people, we may eventually discover that we have also removed some of the conditions in which emotional intelligence develops. At the very least, we lose something simpler and more immediate: the everyday occasions through which people come to know one another.
Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon
Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.
