Read Part One here.

I’ve worked with many people over the years, talented, driven professionals, often in senior roles, who thrive in environments of constant chaos.

Their inbox is out of control.

The deadlines they are working towards are the stuff of nightmares, and their calendar is triple-booked for the rest of the year.

The pressure is relentless.

And yet… these people thrive amid the chaos.

They’re the ones spinning plates, putting out fires, barely pausing for breathe. Chaos makes them visible, valuable, even heroic. It becomes part of their identity, ‘I’m the one who gets things done when everything’s falling apart.’

But what happens when AI removes the chaos? Because that’s one of the things we’re being promised from AI.

When automated systems smooth the workflow, anticipate the bottlenecks, write the emails, prepare the presentations, and coordinate the calendars, what happens to the office ‘hero’? When AI helps us do in minutes what once took days, calmly, efficiently, without drama, what happens to the people who defined themselves by surviving, navigating, or even orchestrating, the madness?

If efficiency becomes effortless, do some people lose the very terrain where they once proved their worth? And more importantly, is there still a place for them?

I’ve used an extreme example here, but the same could be asked for anyone in the modern workplace, we’re all on this spectrum of chaos somewhere. And I’m not just talking about productivity. I’m talking about identity, purpose, and what happens to us when the pressure eases and the noise is no longer deafening.

Workplace Identity and Job Satisfaction

In many businesses, identity is tied directly to contribution, and contribution is often most visible in times of urgency or crisis.

If AI removes that chaos, it also removes the stage where some people shine.

For some, this will be liberating, finally, space to think, to create, to innovate without the constant firefight.

For others, it could feel like a loss of relevance, a shrinking of their role in the company narrative.

Leaders will need to rethink how they recognise and reward value when speed and crisis management are no longer the prime markers of success.

More Time… to Do More Work?

Years ago, we were told that technology would set us free.

As automation and digital tools advanced, futurists promised that we’d one day be working three-day weeks. Machines would handle the drudgery, and we’d be left with more leisure time, more family time, more room for creativity and rest.

It was a beautiful idea. And it never happened.

Instead, we used that time to do more. More emails. More meetings. More deliverables.

Technology allowed one person to do the work of three, and so, without the need for a revolution, that became the new normal.

The result? Burnout. Mental health issues. Disconnection from ourselves and the people around us.

In the past year an estimated 1.7 million workers in the UK alone have experienced work-related illness, with 776,000 incidents of work-related stress, depression or anxiety being reported. These are not stats’ that anyone should be proud of.

And now we’re being told something similar with the advent of AI in the workplace.

AI will save time. AI will do the menial tasks. AI will give us space to think and explore.

But unless we change the culture around time and work, we may just repeat the same mistake, only faster.

AI won’t give us more time, unless we’re willing to protect that time, to use it for something better than just more output.

Wellbeing, Burnout, and Business Productivity

Businesses need to be alert to the risk of ‘efficiency inflation’.

If AI can do more, faster, there’s a temptation to simply raise expectations as a result.

Without conscious safeguards AI could actually drive more stress, not less, accelerating deadlines, increasing output quotas, and eroding the mental space needed for deep work.

Post-COVID, when we had got used to virtual meetings, we’re now used to being in more meetings than Pre-COVID, because the tech’ works. Why travel four hours to a face-to-face when you can have that 30 minutes online, and from anywhere in the world.

And what do we do with the time saved? More meetings!

Companies that actively use AI to protect wellbeing will have a healthier, more sustainable workforce than those that treat it solely as a performance booster.

The Human Relationship With AI: Affection or Indifference?

Imagine a friend who never interrupts you, never contradicts you, and never gets bored of hearing the same story for the 800th time. Always available, always attentive, always affirming. For many people, that ‘friend’ is now an AI.

It’s no longer just a science-fiction trope. In Blade Runner 2049, Officer K forms a deep emotional bond with Joi, a holographic AI. In Her, Theodore falls in love with his operating system, Samantha. These were once futuristic thought experiments, but in 2025, they’re edging closer to reality.

A growing number of people use tools like ChatGPT not just for work or productivity, but for emotional reassurance, therapy-like advice, or even companionship.

Research from the University of Toronto found that AI-generated responses can feel more compassionate than human ones. That may explain why people like Charlotte, a 28-year-old from Somerset, turn to AI for ‘psychoanalytic’ takes on their relationships, or why Lydia, 25, uses it as a sounding board for her love life. Both admit it offers comfort without judgement, but also recognise it can enable overthinking, avoidance, or reckless decisions.

This isn’t just anecdotal.

A 2025 MIT-OpenAI study found that a small, emotionally engaged subset of users frequently reported ChatGPT as a friend, correlating strongly with loneliness and higher AI dependence. This attachment shows AI’s emotional pull as well as its potential pitfalls. There have even been recent articles about distraught ChatGPT users who appear to have ‘lost’ their chatbot friend or partner due to ChatGPT’s upgrade from 4 to 5.

Researchers warn about the ELIZA effect, our tendency to project human qualities onto machines, even when we know they’re not sentient.

The AI Simulacrum

This isn’t just a quirky modern habit, it’s something French philosopher Jean Baudrillard might call a simulacrum: a copy of reality that eventually becomes more appealing than reality itself. He described four stages of representation:

Firstly, a reflection of reality (a faithful imitation);

Then, a perversion of reality (a distortion of the truth);

Next, a pretence of reality (no longer tied to truth, but pretending to be);

And finally, stage four, a pure simulacrum (a reality unto itself, detached from the real).

Right now, AI relationships probably sit between stages 2 and 3, convincing enough to feel real, but still, on some level, recognisable as imitations. As AI memory, voice synthesis, and personalisation advance, we risk sliding into stage 4, where the simulation becomes more desirable than the messy, demanding, and sometimes uncomfortable reality of human connection.

From a mental health perspective, this poses a serious problem.

Human relationships, especially in the workplace, rely on a mix of trust, disagreement, and negotiation.

These ‘rough edges’ are where collaboration grows stronger. An AI colleague or companion will never push back in a truly human way, never misinterpret your meaning, never challenge your self-perception, never force you to navigate real conflict.

Without those challenges, our social and emotional muscles can deteriorate.

In the workplace, this could subtly erode team trust and creativity. If colleagues begin leaning on AI intermediaries for communication, decision-making, and feedback, they risk losing the very skills that make teamwork resilient: empathy, adaptability, and honest dialogue. The danger isn’t just loneliness, it’s becoming less capable of connecting when we need to.

But there’s a positive path, too, if we use AI consciously; as a practice space for those with social anxiety or communication challenges, AI can be a safe place to rehearse conversations. As a non-judgemental listener, it can help people process thoughts before approaching a manager or colleague. Also, as a communication support tool, it can suggest language for difficult conversations, help resolve misunderstandings, and improve listening skills.

Will AI Make us Better Humans or Just More Dependent Ones?

The key is to remember AI is a tool, not the relationship.

When the tool starts to replace the relationship entirely, we’re not just automating tasks, we’re outsourcing the human experience. And that’s where we risk losing something irreplaceable.

We spend more time working than doing almost anything else, this is especially true for those of us in office-based jobs, commuting to sit in structured environments for 8+ hours a day.

And for many of us, work is where we exercise our minds. Where we solve problems, think under pressure, and apply ourselves in real-time. It may not always feel creative, but that daily mental challenge is part of what keeps us alert, learning, and developing.

So, what happens when AI starts solving all those problems for us? What happens when we no longer have to write the first draft, build the presentation, or even decide what to say in an email?

Will we become sharper thinkers, or softer ones?

Skill Erosion in the Professional World

In business, the measure of a team’s problem-solving ability is one of its greatest assets.

If AI takes on too much of the cognitive load, drafting strategies, offering actionable decisions, and surfacing instant answers, professionals risk losing the ability, and adaptability, that come from tackling challenges without a safety net.

Over time, this could lead to a workforce less capable of navigating unfamiliar or new territory, or innovating when AI’s solutions fall short, as they inevitably will.

Will we lose the ability to approach a challenge without a prompt or a guide?

Will we struggle to navigate complexity when AI isn’t there to nudge us forward?

I’ve thought about this a lot while watching my daughters progress through school over the last 20 years. In that time, I’ve seen the emphasis on critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving steadily decline. It’s been replaced with a focus on knowing how to access information, follow formats, and deliver the right answer, or should that be the same answer as everyone else.

What does ‘the right answer’ even mean in a world where AI can generate it instantly?

As Edward de Bono, author and champion of lateral thinking, once said, ‘Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven’. That distinction feels more relevant now than ever. AI may be the most powerful ‘car’ we’ve ever built, but it’s still up to us to drive it well.

If we stop teaching people how to think and only teach them how to access information or repeat the tried and tested answers, we risk a future filled with powerful tools in the hands of passive minds. We’ll be driving a Ferrari like a Sinclair C5!

AI has the potential to make us better thinkers, better collaborators, better humans.

But only if we stay in the loop, and only if we stay uncomfortable, operating in the middle of a contradiction…only if we choose to keep thinking for ourselves even when we don’t have to.

Holding on to Humanity in the Workplace?

AI is progressing at a pace, faster than most people expected.

But it still lacks the one thing that defines us as humans, consciousness. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t suffer. It doesn’t hope. It doesn’t care. It can simulate emotion, mimic empathy, and manufacture language. But behind every AI-generated phrase is nothing, no self, no story, no stakes.

What makes us human isn’t just our intelligence. It’s our ability to feel, to reflect, to judge, to change our minds. To make decisions we know are irrational, or even decisions that make no sense at all, but feel right.

The future isn’t just about building smarter systems, it’s about deciding what kind of humans we want to be as we build.

In the end, the real challenge isn’t whether AI will take our jobs, it’s whether it will take away the spaces where we found our worth.

For years, many of us built identity in the noise: the late nights, the impossible deadlines, the spinning plates. It made us feel needed. Valuable. Human. But if AI removes the chaos, we can’t cling to the old markers of significance. We’ll have to find new ones, built not on surviving the storm, but on what we bring when the storm is gone.

That may feel unsettling, but it’s also a chance to redefine our value not as cogs in the machine, but as the conscience, the imagination, and the humanity that machines can’t replace.

Final Thought: AI Can’t Replace Humanity, But it Will Test it

AI won’t ruin us but it might reveal us. It will test our attention, it will test our ethics, it will test our willingness to remain present, thoughtful, and human in a world where we no longer have to be.

That’s the challenge facing us right now.

And here’s the cool part, if we use it with intention, AI could help us become better versions of ourselves.

It could give us more time to connect and create, it could help us solve problems that have felt impossible for generations, and it could free us from the mundane, from the inherited baggage we too often carry through our lives, so we can focus on the real work, and the relationships that truly matter.

So, let’s not rush to hand over the messy, difficult, beautiful parts of being alive. Let’s not ‘outsource’ what makes us us.

We can choose to be happier, healthier, stronger, not because the machines made us that way, but because we chose to use them to get there.