When Workers Choose AI Over Colleagues: A CHRO's Guide to What's Really Happening

There is a statistic I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Kelly Monahan is a researcher with a Ph.D. in psychology. She has spent years studying AI adoption, generational workforce dynamics, and the behavioral science of how people actually work. She came on The Human Capitalist to talk about what her research has surfaced.

The number: 64% of workers say they prefer collaborating with AI over a human colleague.

Not using AI. Not tolerating AI. Preferring it.

If you lead people for a living, that number should land differently than it probably did. It is not a technology story. It is a story about the state of human collaboration inside your organization.

What the Number Actually Measures

Most HR leaders hear "64% prefer AI" and think: AI is winning the technology race, we need to accelerate adoption.

That is the wrong takeaway.

Kelly's research isn't measuring enthusiasm for AI features. It's measuring what workers choose when given a real collaborative task and a real choice of partner. When they consistently choose AI, the signal isn't about the technology. It's about the alternative.

AI doesn't judge. It doesn't compete for credit. It doesn't come to a collaboration loaded with political history. It gives feedback without an agenda.

Gartner research has documented that trust in management and colleagues has been declining across enterprise organizations for years. What Kelly's research shows is that AI has filled part of that gap. Not because AI is trustworthy in the way humans should be. Because the bar for human collaboration has dropped low enough that AI cleared it.

That is a culture and team dynamics problem. It is not solved by an AI platform purchase.

The Team Design Question CHROs Are Not Asking

Here is where the conversation with Kelly got specific about what CHROs need to think about differently.

Most organizations still design teams as collections of human roles. The org chart shows people. AI shows up as a tool, sitting beside the chart, not inside it.

That framing is already out of date.

When 64% of workers are choosing AI as a preferred collaborator, they are not using it like a search engine or a calculator. They are relating to it as something that participates in their work. The org chart says one thing. The actual working relationships say something else.

Kelly's point is specific: the near-term reality is AI becoming a formal participant in team workflows. Not a resource you check out from IT. Not a pilot running in the background. Something with a role in how decisions get made, how work gets reviewed, how output gets evaluated.

CHROs who design for human teams and layer AI on top will find themselves perpetually behind. The organizations getting this right are designing for hybrid teams from the start, building accountability structures that account for AI participation rather than assuming human-only collaboration as the default.

The Mistake Most HR Leaders Make

Kelly names this directly: the most common CHRO response to data like the 64% finding is to launch an AI adoption initiative.

Wrong diagnosis. Wrong solution.

The workforce has already adopted. The 64% stat doesn't indicate a usage problem. It indicates a relationship problem. Workers have formed a stronger working relationship with AI than with many of their human colleagues.

An adoption program says: we need people to use AI more.

The actual problem says: we need to redesign how humans and AI work together in ways that strengthen, rather than undermine, the human relationships that still matter.

Those are different projects. The first one is easy to measure and satisfying to launch. The second one is harder, and it is the one that addresses what the research is actually telling you.

The 90-Day Action Plan

When I asked Kelly what a CHRO who knows they are behind should do right now, her answer was specific and practical.

Start with an audit. Not of AI tools deployed. Of AI actually used.

Most organizations have a significant gap between the AI capabilities they have approved and the AI behaviors actually happening across teams. People are using tools the company didn't sanction. They have built workflows IT doesn't know about. Policy says one thing; behavior says another.

That gap is where the risk lives. It is also where the real insight lives.

Spending 90 days mapping the actual state of AI use in your organization gives you something most CHROs don't have: a factual baseline. You can't design good team norms around AI participation if you don't know what participation is already happening.

From that audit, the next step is a structured conversation at the team level: when does AI participate in decisions? When does human judgment hold? What does accountability look like when output is AI-assisted? These aren't policy questions. They are team design questions. The CHRO's role is to create the framework, not mandate the answers.

The Hopeful Version

I asked Kelly where this goes if we get it right.

The 64% stat isn't a story about AI beating humans at collaboration. It's a story about a workforce that is already figuring out how to work differently, and doing it mostly without organizational direction.

That is actually an opportunity. The CHROs who engage with this research now, who ask harder questions about team trust and collaboration quality, and who treat AI integration as a workforce design challenge rather than a technology rollout, have a chance to shape what hybrid teamwork looks like for the next decade.

The ones who wait are designing around decisions that will get made without them.

Watch or listen to the full episode with Kelly Monahan on YouTube, Spotify, and the Purple Acorn Network.

Take the FutHRist Self-Assessment at trentcotton.com/futhrist-self-assessment to assess your readiness across the five mindsets defining the next generation of CHRO leadership.