Output’s up, vibes are down
Is AI making teams more robotic? Human-AI teams are 50% more productive. But, they’re about 25% less social. Output’s up, vibes are down.
New MIT/Johns Hopkins study: 2,234 workers. 11,000+ ads created. Ads tested with 5 million impressions on X.
Researchers found something most AI coverage skips: When people work with AI instead of each other, the social fabric of the team disappears. Human teams sent 18% more "interpersonal" messages—the rapport-building, the check-ins, the "sorry, had to grab coffee." Human-AI teams replaced all of that with instructions and task updates.
Gallup has spent 30 years documenting what happens when the vibes go down:
Employees with a best friend at work are 7x more likely to be fully engaged. When 60% of a company has a work best friend, profits go up 12% and safety incidents drop 36%.
When 60% of employees in a company have a work best friend, safety incidents decrease by 36%, customer engagement increases by 7%, and profits increase by 12%.
And now we're systematically stripping that out of work—one agent at a time.
The MIT study also found something called "diversity collapse." The more you delegate to AI, the more your team's output starts to look the same. Human-AI teams produced more homogeneous outputs—their ads were more self-similar—while human-human teams produced higher image quality and greater creative diversity.
So you get more bland output.
Look, no one’s going to use less AI. But, we do need to deliberately protect the conditions where human creativity and connection could survive alongside it.
That's the actual org design question right now: not "where do we add AI?" but "what do we need to protect so the humans don't just become AI supervisors?"
Working through this with your team? Happy to think through it together.
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Sources:
"Collaborating with AI Agents: A Field Experiment on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance," Harang Ju & Sinan Aral, Feb 2026
"Why We Need Best Friends at Work," AnnaMarie Mann, Gallup, Jan 2018
"The Increasing Importance of a Best Friend at Work," Alok Patel & Stephanie Plowman, Gallup, Aug 2022