The growing trend of ‘social offloading’—where AI takes the place of your boss’s empathy

(SeaPRwire) –   You’ve likely heard this scenario before: an employee received a message from her boss that she couldn’t fully understand, and suspected it was written by AI. As a result, she turned to an AI tool to interpret the message for her. After sharing its interpretation, the AI then asked if she wanted it to draft a reply to send back to her boss.

The employee paused. “‘I literally think [my boss’] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,’” the employee told Leena Rinne, vice president of leadership, business, and coaching at Skillsoft, an edtech and skills management platform. She added to Rinne, “‘I can’t crack the code of working with [my boss], because it’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.’” 

Rinne names this phenomenon “social offloading”: it occurs when interpersonal skills that require human judgment, empathy, or courage are outsourced to AI. It is similar to “cognitive offloading,” the practice of shifting often routine menial tasks to AI-powered technology to cut down on mental effort, and it has the potential to reshape workplace culture. 

Common examples of social offloading include a manager preparing for a performance review and asking AI to outline how to lead the conversation. It can also look like an employee asking AI to craft a reply to a high-stress email from their manager.

“If I’m always asking AI how I should respond to my boss,” Rinne told , “I don’t actually learn how to interact with my boss on my own. I don’t actually learn how to build a genuine relationship with my boss.”

According to a Harvard Business Review analysis of AI usage patterns, humans are increasingly using AI to fill human-centric roles, with the most common uses being therapy and companionship. Rinne says the problem is not that AI fails to offer helpful advice, but rather the critical skills we lose when we rely too heavily on the technology. 

“The risk is that we never develop these critical in-the-moment skills ourselves, because we never learn how to navigate emotional intelligence if AI does that work for us,” Rinne said. 

Skillsoft both uses and sells AI tools to its customers, but its tools are designed to coach people on how to hold real-world professional conversations. The company’s product, CAISY, lets users practice holding conversations and receive targeted feedback before they take part in important work discussions. 

Instead of giving users a ready-made “here’s the answer, here’s what you should say” script, Rinne says the AI trains people to build those interpersonal skills on their own. “I’m actually building my ability to navigate a difficult conversation or a client conversation because I get the practice myself,” 

Paying the price for cutting middle management 

AI is not the root cause of the problem, but rather a growing leadership vacuum, Rinne says. As organizations have flattened their corporate structures and cut middle management roles, formal mentorship and coaching have fallen by the wayside. 

A clear example of this strategy is Meta, which has cut 25,000 jobs since 2022 and highlights that its AI team has just one boss for every 50 engineers. Traditionally, a 25-to-1 employee-to-boss ratio is seen as the upper limit of the standard span-of-control framework, but the company is fully committing to AI. Leveraging AI, many organizations are now pushing past long-held limits for management workloads. 

A recent sharp uptick in hiring younger entry-level workers is another common approach to this shift, adopted by Cognizant, an IT consulting firm that reports more than 350,000 employees globally on its website, and is currently in the middle of a major entry-level hiring spree. 

“If you can equip these new workers with AI, you turn expertise into a commoditized resource. You put expertise right at their fingertips. That means you can run more entry-level programs, hire more new graduates, and help them reach expert competency much faster,” Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S told ’s Jeremy Kahn earlier this year. While this approach does flatten the workplace pyramid, “the advantage gap won’t come from expertise anymore — it will come from interdisciplinary skills,” he said. 

Rinne acknowledges the upside of this shift from an organizational perspective: fewer managers can lead to faster decision-making and more employee autonomy. Even so, she says managers are still needed to turn strategy into tangible results and execution, develop talent, and keep teams cohesive. 

“There’s a risk that organizations start treating the scope of a leader’s role like a simple math problem, when it’s really a capability building problem,” she said.

While previous generations had decades to learn how to navigate workplace change and the organizational dynamics that come with it, today “young people enter the workforce and are just thrown into the deep end,” Rinne explained.

Some have blamed young workers’ struggles to navigate the workplace on a general decline in social activity. Young people today are dating and socializing less than previous generations, and that shift is hurting their work performance, says Tessa West, a psychology professor at New York University whose research focuses on communication between employees and bosses. 

“You learn a lot of key skills from early personal relationships that you then use in the workplace,” West said. “Negotiation is a huge one, and compromise is another.”

Even romantic relationships can’t fill the gap Rinne sees growing between employees and their bosses. She points to her own early career experience, which helped prepare her for her current role as an organizational leader. 

“I’ve had incredible opportunities to be coached and have organizations invest in my development,” she said. “The contrast today is that Gen Z is entering the workforce, and there’s a common assumption that because they grew up digital, they’re already ready for the pace of change and already prepared to navigate workplace dynamics.” 

But in reality, leaders are not equipping younger employees to navigate change, communicate effectively, and build good judgment, she says, which lowers their competitive advantage at a time when human-centric skills drive success in the AI era. 

“We’re just expecting them to enter this chaotic whirlwind moment and be able to navigate it effectively on their own,” she said.