If you’ve heard this before, please stop. An employee receives a message from his boss, but doesn’t quite understand what it means. Suspecting that the message was written by an AI, the employee asked the AI tool to interpret the message. The AI responded and asked if he would like to return a draft response to his boss.
The employee stopped. “I literally think so.” [my boss’] The AI is talking to my AI. That’s the real conversation that’s happening right now,” an employee told Leena Rinne, vice president of leadership, business, and coaching at Skillsoft, an education technology and skills management platform. [my boss]Because it’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth. ”
Rinne calls this phenomenon “social offloading,” or the outsourcing of interpersonal skills that require human judgment, empathy, and courage to AI. This is akin to “cognitive offloading,” or moving simple tasks to technology such as AI to reduce mental effort, and can disrupt workplace culture.
Social offloading can look like a boss preparing for a performance review and asking the AI how to have a conversation. Or it could be an employee who asks you to craft a response to a stressful email from your manager.
“If you’re always asking AI questions, how can you answer them to your boss?” Rinne said. luck, “In fact, I haven’t learned how to relate to my boss. I haven’t actually learned how to have a relationship with my boss.”
Humans are increasingly using AI in human-like ways, with the most common uses being therapy and companionship, one reporter said. harvard business review Analysis of AI usage patterns. Rinne said the problem isn’t that AI doesn’t provide useful advice, but that if you rely on it too much, you lose skills.
“Even if AI were to navigate emotional intelligence for us, we don’t know how to navigate emotional intelligence, so we run the risk of not developing important skills that we can use in the moment,” Rinne says.
Skillsoft uses and sells AI tools to customers whose purpose is to coach people through how to have conversations in the real world. Their product, CAISY, allows you to practice conversations and provide feedback before having important work conversations.
Instead of saying, “Here’s the answer, here’s what to say,” AI teaches the person how to develop intrapersonal skills, Rinne said. “With practice, I’m really developing the skills to navigate difficult conversations and conversations with clients.”
Pay the price for cutting middle management positions
Rinne says AI is not the cause of the problem, but rather a leadership vacuum. As organizations flatten their structures and eliminate middle management, mentorship and coaching are being sidelined.
A prime example of this strategy is Meta, which has cut 25,000 jobs since 2022 and touted an AI team with one boss for every 50 engineers. While a 25:1 employee-to-supervisor ratio has traditionally been considered the upper limit of so-called span of control, the company is fully committed to AI. Using AI, some organizations are pushing the boundaries of control.
A recent uptick in junior hires appears to be a common approach, as is Cognizant, an IT consulting firm with more than 350,000 employees worldwide, which is hiring heavily at entry-level positions.
“If we can equip these people with AI, we have commoditized expertise. We can put it in the hands of people ready to use. So we can have more entry-level programs, reach more school graduates, and get them to expertise faster,” said Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S. luck At the beginning of this year. Although the workplace pyramid is flattening, “the asymmetry doesn’t come from expertise; it comes from interdisciplinary skills,” he says.
Rinne believes that having fewer managers is good from an organizational perspective, as it means faster decision-making and more autonomy. But managers are still needed to translate strategy into results and execution, develop talent and bring teams together, she said.
“There is a risk that organizations start treating the scope of a leader’s role like a math problem, when in reality it is a matter of competency,” she says.
Whereas other generations took decades to learn how to navigate change and the organizational dynamics that accompany change, now “young people are entering the workforce and they’re just being thrown at the bottom,” Linnaeus explained.
Some blame young workers’ struggles in the workplace because they are generally less sociable. They date and socialize less, and that impacts their performance at work, says Tessa West, a psychology professor at New York University whose research focuses on communication between employees and managers.
“You learn a lot of skills during those early relationships that transfer into the workplace,” West says. “Negotiations are big, and so are compromises.”
Rinne believes that even a romantic relationship cannot bridge the gap between an employee and their boss. She notes that her own experience helps prepare her for her current role as an organizational leader.
“I had a great opportunity to be coached and invested in my development,” she said. “The contrast is that Gen Z is coming in. I think as digital kids, there’s an assumption that they’re already ready to handle the pace of change, or that they’re already ready to navigate it.”
But in reality, she said, leaders are not equipping young employees to deal with change, communicate effectively and use good judgment, reducing their competitive advantage when human-centered skills are driving success in the AI era.
“We are hopeful that they will be able to enter this moment of madness and navigate it effectively,” she said.
A version of this article was published on Fortune.com on March 28, 2026.
