WHEN AI MAKES COWORKERS LESS NECESSARY: RELATIONAL DEPENDENCE AND THE NEW PEOPLE-MANAGEMENT CHALLENGE IN KNOWLEDGE WORK

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is usually framed as a technology that automates tasks, augments workers, and improves productivity. We argue that a different organizational consequence deserves explicit theorization: GenAI can reduce the extent to which successful task completion requires input from another human actor. We define relational dependence of task completion as the degree to which a task requires cognitive, informational, evaluative, communicative, or coordinative contributions from other people. GenAI can partially disintermediate these contributions by supplying advice, drafting, interpretation, rehearsal, feedback, and preliminary sensemaking directly to the focal worker. This does not make employees independent of organizations or technology. Rather, it can make specific task components less relationally mediated. We distinguish this construct from help-seeking, relationship instrumentality, interaction frequency, social capital, and the broader social fabric of organizations. We then develop a task-contingent model of AI-enabled relational disintermediation. The model predicts that informational, cognitive, evaluative, and communicative dependence are more susceptible to GenAI substitution than high-accountability or deeply contextual coordinative dependence. It also proposes that interpersonal interaction cost and employee characteristics such as communication apprehension or introversion shape the likelihood of substituting AI for coworkers. Finally, we theorize a productivity–relationship paradox: the same reduction in relational dependence that improves short-term task efficiency may reduce incidental learning, weak-tie formation, mentoring, expertise visibility, and social-capital accumulation. For human resource management (HRM), the central challenge is therefore not simply to regulate AI use, but to distinguish human interactions that are no longer operationally necessary from those that remain strategically necessary for organizational learning, coordination, and resilience.