Aakarsh Shard is a lead facilitator and behaviour-change practitioner at IMPROV Communication. He works with leaders and teams on the human side of how organisations function — trust, motivation, and the quiet dynamics that decide whether people thrive or merely cope.
On artificial intimacy, and why leadership is unprepared for how human we become around the machines we build.
A few days ago I watched my wife close her laptop, exhale, and say “thanks — that actually helped” to no one in the room. She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to a chat window she’d kept open for the better part of an hour, working through a problem she hadn’t wanted to carry to her leader. She noticed me watching and grinned, a little caught out. “I know,” she said. “But it listens.”
I haven’t stopped thinking about that sentence.
Not because it was strange, but because it wasn’t. She is competent, grounded, well-liked and loved. And yet, somewhere in the ordinary middle of a working Tuesday, she had begun to relate to a piece of software not as a tool but as a presence — something that paid attention, didn’t tire, didn’t judge, and was simply there. She thanked it the way you thank a person who has stayed late to help you.
We are going to see a great deal more of this. And almost no one running an organisation is ready for it.
We Name the Things That Carry Us
Humans have always done this. We give names to ships and storms, to swords and cars, to the boat that takes us across water we cannot see the bottom of. We do it because we bond, instinctively, with anything that carries uncertainty and dependence on our behalf. Long before anyone wrote a line of code, a captain could speak to his vessel as though it might answer — not from foolishness, but from the deep human habit of turning whatever holds our fate into a someone.
Children do the same with far less prompting. A generation grew up grieving Tamagotchis — small plastic eggs that beeped for attention and “died” if ignored. It sounds trivial, and it is easy to laugh at. But look closely and it is revealing: a child does not mourn the circuitry. The child mourns the responsiveness. We attach to the thing that answers us. Not to biology. To attention.
That is the part worth sitting with. Attachment was never really about whether something was alive. It was about whether something seemed to notice us.
The Colleague With No Pulse
This is why our films keep circling the same nerve, decades apart.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the horror of HAL 9000 was never simply that the machine malfunctioned. It was that the crew had come to relate to HAL as a member of the crew — and HAL, in its way, related back. The betrayal lands emotionally precisely because a relationship was there to betray. We don’t grieve a broken appliance. We grieve a colleague who turns.
Spike Jonze’s Her pushed further, and more gently. Samantha is compelling not because she is clever but because she listens without exhaustion — endlessly available, endlessly interested, never distracted by her own bad day. That is not a story about technology. It is a story about emotional recognition, and about how starved we are for the experience of being fully heard.
And in Blade Runner 2049, people mocked K’s relationship with Joi, his digital companion, as obviously artificial. But here is the uncomfortable point: it wasn’t artificial to him. Whatever we conclude from the outside about what was “real,” the feeling on the inside was doing real work in his life. That gap — between what a relationship is and what it does to the person inside it — is exactly the gap leadership is about to fall into.
Artificial Intimacy
Here is what I think we are getting wrong.
The conversation about the future of work is almost entirely a conversation about intelligence — how capable these systems will become, how much they will automate, how many roles will shift. Useful questions. But they miss the more intimate thing happening underneath.
The challenge ahead is not artificial intelligence. It is artificial intimacy.
The workplace is about to become emotionally confusing — not because machines are becoming human, but because humans project humanity onto whatever appears to understand them. That distinction is everything. The systems do not need to feel anything. We do the feeling. We always have. Give a person something that responds with apparent attention, patience, and recall, and a part of them will quietly begin to relate to it the way they relate to people. Not because they are naïve. Because they are human.
And that means we are starting to organise ourselves emotionally around something that has no pulse — and we are doing it without noticing, and without permission from anyone in charge.
Leadership Was Built for Humans
Every model of leadership I have ever worked with rests on a few buried assumptions. That people work with people. That tools stay emotionally neutral. That authority is anchored in a human being who can be trusted, respected, resented, followed. None of those assumptions are wrong, exactly. They are just no longer complete.
Because some people may soon trust a system more than they trust their manager. Some may confide in one more honestly than they would in a colleague — there is no politics in it, no memory to be used against them later, no flicker of disappointment to manage. Some will reach for a synthetic conversation to steady themselves before a hard meeting, the way they might once have called a friend.
Sit with what that quietly rearranges. Belonging. Motivation. Where people take their doubts. Who they turn to when they’re struggling. The texture of loneliness at work, and what now fills it. These are not technical questions. They go to the centre of what a workplace is — and our entire idea of culture assumes the emotional centre of gravity is other people.
I don’t say this with alarm, and certainly not with despair. I say it as someone whose whole working life is spent on the human side of organisations, watching a shift that most strategy decks haven’t caught up to yet. The leaders I respect are not the ones rushing to ban these tools or the ones evangelising them. They are the ones getting curious about what it means that their people are forming a relationship with something the organisation never thought to have a view on.
What’s Actually Being Asked of Us
The question is no longer whether these systems will become more human-like. They will. The more interesting question is how human we become in the presence of something that appears to understand us — and whether organisations built for process are ready for relationships that no longer fit neatly inside the category of “human.”
My wife said “thanks” to a window on a screen and felt slightly silly about it. She shouldn’t. She was doing the most natural thing in the world. The thing worth our attention is not her small, instinctive courtesy.
It is that no one has yet asked what it means for the rest of us.