“Automate, optimise, accelerate.” That’s been the rallying cry of workplace tech for the past decade. Now, with agentic AI stepping onto the scene, we’re entering a whole new phase of speed and efficiency. AI agents are booking meetings, scanning CVs, screening candidates, and even helping with performance reviews. Yet, while 75% of UK employees are fine working alongside AI agents, only 27% feel comfortable being managed by one – according to new Workday research.
This is an important tell. HR and business leaders are under pressure to deliver efficiency, speed, and scalability. But in chasing productivity, the human at the heart of work is at risk of being stripped away.
The hidden cost of efficiency
AI is already reshaping HR. According to Gartner, the share of HR leaders who are actively planning or already deploying GenAI has jumped from 19% in June 2023 to 61% by January 2025. Automated operations remove manual workloads. Chatbots streamline employee queries. Performance dashboards give managers instant insights into patterns within workforce data. These tools save time, but they also flatten nuance.
If your AI agent tries to match colleagues for mentoring partnerships based on basic attributes like title, location, age, you can miss out on meaningful connections. There are certain qualities that a checklist just can’t spot – the adaptability, creativity or spark that could light up the dynamic between two people. And in day-to-day work, the same thing plays out daily: the AI assistant schedules the meeting and fires the follow-up. It’s efficient, but it’s missing the small signals of connection – the casual chat, the knowing glance, the spontaneous idea.
These aren’t inefficiencies. They are the connective tissue of collaboration. Strip them away, and organisations risk disengagement, misunderstanding and mistrust – not exactly the recipe for high performance.
The quiet driver of great teams
What HR and tech leaders often overlook in the AI debate is the role of self-awareness. Strong teams don’t come from processes alone. They come from people who understand themselves and each other well enough to adapt.
Self-awareness is the difference between a manager who unintentionally fails to connect with a direct report and one who flexes their style to motivate them. It’s the difference between a new joiner who feels misunderstood in onboarding and one who feels seen and supported from day one.
The problem is that awareness of self and others is hard-earned and easily forgotten, so it must be practiced regularly. Most organisations rally their staff for a team-building workshop, but fail to make use of the recommendations in the long-term. By the time the next review cycle arrives, the insight has faded. Paradoxically, AI can help here – not by replacing judgement, but by surfacing personality insights in the moments they matter most, within the workflow.
Embedding insight into the flow of work
Take Spotify’s Discover Weekly. The magic isn’t in having the biggest music library, it’s in the way the experience feels personal, adaptive, and alive to your preferences. That’s what makes people stick with it.
Now imagine workplace technology working the same way. Instead of generic prompts, your HR dashboard could suggest how a colleague likes to receive feedback. Your onboarding tools and applications could adapt to a new hire’s learning style. Your messaging platform could remind you that one teammate prefers concise and direct updates, while another thrives on more exploratory discussion. A manager preparing for a difficult conversation could get a nudge about what motivates that particular employee.
That’s the kind of shift that takes AI from a basic productivity tool to a dynamic bridge between people. When the tech adapts to people’s styles, the whole organisation wins.
Opening up personality intelligence through APIs
Workplace AI tools need access to behavioural insight if they’re going to be sufficiently adaptive to support real human connection. This is where APIs come in. By surfacing personality and preference data then delivering it in the moment of need, APIs calling on personality data can allow developers to embed self-awareness directly into the workflow.
But the aim isn’t to reduce people to data points. It’s to provide leaders and employees with timely, practical insight that makes collaboration smoother and conversations more constructive. In many ways, it’s a trust issue: people are more likely to embrace AI at work when it feels like it’s enhancing relationships, not automating them away. The real goal is to design workplace technology that doesn’t just process tasks quickly, but helps people see and understand each other more clearly.
The question is clear: are we making work better, or just faster? AI can’t replicate empathy, but it can remind us when to use it. APIs can deliver psychological data and insights, embedding self-awareness into everyday interactions. That is technology at its best, not making us more robotic, but helping us become more human.
Reclaiming the human advantage
The irony of agentic AI is that the more we delegate decisions to machines, the more important it becomes to understand each other as humans. In a workplace shaped by algorithms, self-awareness is more than just a luxury.
Future-ready teams won’t be those that adopt AI the fastest, but those that use it to personalise, to connect, and to collaborate in ways that feel more human. The opportunity in front of us is not to automate relationships, but to deepen them. AI won’t crown the fastest scalers; it will reward the organisations that pause long enough to really see the people behind the processes.
