The colleague who stopped looking at the camera

I work from home. With our head offices 1100km away, I rarely meet people face-to-face and I spend a large amount of my time in online Teams meetings. Lately AI has become a staple in my work, helping me prepare for meetings, write content, build prototypes and streamline everyday tasks. I’ve never had a problem with any of this, nor have any of my colleagues, and collaboration has always been fine. But recently, I started to notice subtle changes.

It started with an online meeting where one colleague, who had been working on a new idea, was updating another colleague on what he was doing. The topic was complex and he was adamant about making sure his counterpart got every detail. Even after the colleague had expressed multiple times that he got the gist of things which was all that was needed as it was just an update, not a handover. Weirder yet, he wasn’t looking at the camera while doing so. Making it look like he was not at all paying attention to the other person’s reactions.  The other person, quite puzzled by all this, shrugged it off but was clearly unsure about what this conversation was all about.

I’m very much an eye-contact person so when people avoid it (or seem to avoid), I immediately notice it. Are they angry? Is something going on? So, afterwards I contacted my colleague privately to ask if he was ok, as it all seemed a bit weird.

What followed was something I had not expected.

After working with Claude on this idea for so long, it had become second nature to him to be curt and directive, making sure every detail was clear. Actively avoiding any wording that wasn’t directly related to the task. He hadn’t realized he was doing the same in the conversation with our colleague. In regard to looking into the camera, working with Claude had never required it so unconsciously, he had shifted his gaze away from the camera, to focus on the text on his screen as was usual while working with Claude.

He hadn’t realized he was doing it but did recognize it when I asked him about it.

Like in many companies, AI has quickly become an integral part of our day-to-day business, from ideation and design to streamlining processes, speeding up research and improving content creation. It is changing the fabric of work, but it seems it’s also changing our ways of communicating with each other.

This is not a new topic. There has been research done on the effects of AI in multiple areas of human interactions. From how cognitive spillover from AI influences shared language, collective attention, shared mental models, and social cohesion by Riedl, Savage, and Zvelebilova, to research of how people collaborate with a partner if they believe that partner is a bot versus a human.

In this last one by Harrell (Duke) and Traeger (Notre Dame), over 4,000 people were asked to play a simple game where players had to choose between cooperating or not, and where going it alone paid more than cooperating but left the other person with almost nothing. Those who thought they were interacting with a bot were noticeably less cooperative than those who thought they were interacting with a human.

The more relevant part came next. The researchers ran a second round in which everyone played against someone they were correctly told was a real person. Those who thought they had been playing a bot in the first round were still markedly less cooperative with the human in the second round than those who believed they had been playing a human before.

No. It has long been established that interaction with someone will likely influence how you interact with the next person you encounter shortly after. We’ve all experienced it. You walk out of a heated argument and the next person you encounter gets their head bitten off, regardless of whether they did anything wrong. The emotional carryover from your last interaction.

The difference is that in those situations there are two human beings interacting. Emotion, actions and arguments that feed each other. With a bot there is no emotion coming back at you, and no real argument unless you ask for one. Furthermore, there is no need for empathy with a bot from the get-go so you already start differently.

There is something else too. When you bite someone’s head off, they push back. They go quiet, they look hurt, or they tell you off, and that reaction is what makes you aware and pulls you back into line. A bot does none of that. Whatever tone you bring to it, it answers pleasantly and carries on. Nothing corrects your behavior. In fact, cordial or overly polite behavior to an AI will sometimes get you sycophantic results. Stimulating a blunt, direct, task oriented, emotionless communication style. Do that for periods at a time and no wonder the changed mode of interaction gets engrained. My colleague had been in that mode for weeks, several hours a day.

Which is, I suspect, what happened to him. Not the empathy part that the researchers measured, but the same direction of travel: what he had practiced with the AI leaked into how he then dealt with a colleague. And the lack of eye contact simply got overlooked, because the AI had never called him out on it.

We all know AI is influencing the way we work but often overlook that it is also seeping into the interpersonal relations we have with our colleagues. And that is something organizations should be aware of and be vigilant on.

Human-human interaction is what team trust is built on, trust that is hard to build, and easy to lose. Acknowledging what someone just said. Noticing they’re uncomfortable. Giving them the benefit of the doubt when a message comes across blunt. Those are exactly the things being worn down here when interacting with AI for longer periods.

And none of it shows up anywhere. There’s no dashboard for it, and nobody files a ticket to say a meeting felt cold. People might be hesitant to even call each other out on it. Worst yet the people it affects most are your heaviest AI users.

Use AI less? Nope, that’s no solution, that’s simply closing your eyes to reality. Instead, drive awareness. Focus on building interpersonal skills within your team and say something when you notice it in a colleague. Privately and without making it a thing. My colleague hadn’t noticed it himself at all and wasn’t the least bit defensive. He was rather intrigued by it himself to be frank.

Also, ask someone you trust to tell you if they spot it in you, because you won’t catch it yourself. That’s kind of the whole point of the story.

And lastly, consciously make an effort to look at people, even if just through a camera. Not only does it make other people feel acknowledged and seen, it also allows you to see the (non-verbal) effects of what you are saying.

Collaboration within organizations has been my topic for the last 20 years. How AI is changing it, from how we communicate, to how we work together, to how we share what we know, is one of the biggest shifts I’ve seen in all that time. And it’s happening largely undetected within most companies. Like in this example where it changed both the way this colleague:

So, what about you? Is any of this remotely recognizable? And if so, what are you seeing happening around you?cognizable? And if so, what are you seeing happening around you?