As organizations push to accelerate AI adoption, many leaders are considering a simple idea: Stop treating AI as a tool and start treating it as an employee.

Agentic AI systems make this framing feel more plausible. These systems operate with greater autonomy and increasingly can execute some tasks on par with humans. Leaders assume that anthropomorphizing AI will make the technology feel less foreign to workers or that it will signal the company’s AI ambitions to investors, customers, or internal stakeholders.

But it turns out that treating AI as an employee is not so straightforward. In a randomized experiment, we found that humanizing AI can shift accountability away from individuals, increase escalation, reduce review quality, and erode professional identity and trust. What’s more, it doesn’t meaningfully increase people’s intent to adopt the technology and integrate it into workflows—which remain the key obstacle to capturing AI’s enormous value creation promise.

These findings highlight a critical point: Agentic AI has significant potential to expand what organizations can do and how work gets done. The challenge is not whether to adopt it, but how to integrate it into workflows in ways that preserve accountability, maintain quality, and enable employees to work effectively alongside it.