Professionals like Laura Jeffords Greenberg and Nick Studer see AI as a way to ensure they're engaging with people more tactfully and gracefully, taking emotion out of it and providing a sounding board for difficult conversations.
Last year, Anna, a university administrator in New York City, was knee-deep in planning a high-stakes event series with a school abroad. Negotiations had grown prickly, and Anna and her overseas counterpart were butting heads over who should lead the discussions and what the participants should even discuss. Anna drafted an email, not holding back about what she thought of the other university's plans, characterizing its proposal as overly broad and unclear, comparing it to "a big wobbly blancmange." In other words, a mess.
But she never sent it. Instead, Anna did what she often does at work when she's teetering on the edge of being a tad too honest. She loaded the draft into ChatGPT and prompted it with a set of bare-bones instructions. Among them: "Soften the tone."
In seconds, the chatbot spit out a message that felt "a bit more generous" -- bye-bye blancmange -- but still got the point across. She tweaked her draft accordingly and clicked send. To Anna, who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid inflaming an already-fraught relationship with the other school, it was a way of "outsourcing emotional work," no different from the other tedious tasks people are delegating to artificial intelligence. "If I just spent five additional minutes, I probably could have done it on my own," she says. "But I didn't want to spend those five extra minutes."
As workers search for ways to make AI tools relevant to their office life, people like Anna are using chatbots to tone-check angry Slack messages, workshop tricky conversations, appear more firm in negotiations and get a second opinion on how their words might be misconstrued. In a recent survey of 1,000 US professionals, email-verification platform ZeroBounce found that 41% of managers have used AI tools to draft or revise performance reviews and 17% have used the technology to draft or revise layoff emails.
Laura Jeffords Greenberg, legal director at the AI firm Wordsmith AI, says she uses the tools to reword "polite F-you emails." After she's done venting, AI spits out "something that is really usable and diplomatic and not going to ruin your career," she says. "A lot of the time when we're so emotionally invested, we're only looking at it from our point of view. ... This is taking emotion out of it."
There's an argument to be made, of course, that this is yet another cold intrusion of technology into our lives, flattening emotions into a sea of sameness and sapping the compassion out of deeply personal and often consequential exchanges. But many professionals today see it as just the opposite: a way to ensure they're engaging with people more tactfully and gracefully than they might summon on their own.
Nick Studer, chief executive officer of management consultant Oliver Wyman LLC, describes himself as having "a slightly English reserve" in the way he communicates, which he admits sometimes requires people to "read between the lines" of what he's actually saying. "That doesn't work quite as well in either German or American cultures," says Studer, who oversees about 7,000 consultants around the world.
Lately, he's been turning to AI for help, asking Oliver Wyman's internal chatbot to review a draft email to the firm's senior leaders and tweak it to ensure it would resonate with a range of personality types. The bot suggested more anecdotes for the "dreamers" and more specificity for the "thinkers." The revised email wasn't all that different, he says, "but the changes were great."
In another instance, Studer used the chatbot to role-play an "almost terminal" upcoming performance review for one employee. The exercise helped guide Studer toward more actionable feedback and supportive language, but, perhaps more important, he says it provided a sounding board that he and other CEOs often lack. "These conversations are deeply confidential, and at my level ... there's maybe one other person in the whole firm I can even bounce them around with," he says. "It's literally like having a dispassionate version of someone there to just take the question."
Kelly Martin, chief operating officer of Rent One, a chain of rent-to-own stores in the South and Midwest, says she tends to be "too direct." She worried that approach would backfire during a recent performance review with a sensitive employee who'd already had three poor evaluations in a row. "I'm tired of having the same conversations over and over," Martin says. "But I can't come at [them] super directly, or [they're] going to shut down and cry."
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ChatGPT helped her strip the emotional charge from the upcoming review, balance the bad news with references to the employee's strengths and get ahead of potential justifications that might derail the discussion. For Martin, who also ran the review by a trusted human adviser, it added nuance and clarity while also speeding up the process. "Before, I would have typed up the whole review, and I'd have given it a day or two to cool down," she says. "The approach would have taken me longer to get to, and it probably wouldn't have been as clear."
In some ways, AI is replicating the kind of corporate code-switching most of us are already familiar with -- particularly women and people in minority groups, who often feel heightened pressure to adapt their communication style. Jeffords Greenberg of Wordsmith AI says generative AI can help lift that "extra cognitive load."
Bram De Buyser, founder of AI firm Arcology, developed tools to help neurodivergent people communicate. His website, goblin.tools, includes a product called the Formalizer that allows people to input text, select from a drop-down menu of tones like "less snarky" or "more sociable," and get modifications of their writing. Another product, the Judge, interprets the tone of any given piece of text. Reddit forums for people with autism and ADHD now brim with stories of how De Buyser's site has helped them. He says it gets 2 million unique visitors a month, with most traffic on weekdays, suggesting people are relying on the tools at work.
It's hard to tell whether these technological intermediaries truly turn down the temperature of workplace conflict or just mask it behind AI-generated niceties. Studer, at Oliver Wyman, says emails that have obviously been drafted by AI can leave him cold. But he rejects the notion that using the technology to soften or sharpen difficult messages somehow stunts his capacity for real empathy. "I'm looking for AI to help me access the best human I can be rather than to be the human instead of me," he says.
Anna is still unsure. She confesses to feeling a bit of "brain rot" whenever she shops out emotional labor to a machine. And the AI-ified version of her email didn't exactly smooth over negotiations about the event series. She still finds herself at an impasse. Then again, if she'd sent the first draft it could've been worse.
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