A valuable team member

AI is often described as a valuable team member. It supposedly delivers smarter answers than many people, never gets tired and is always available. It doesn’t complain either. And it needs neither vacation nor a raise nor any of those exhausting performance reviews. It just delivers. At the push of a button. At any hour.

You have to let that sink in. Not what is being said about AI, but what is being said about us along the way.

So the ideal team member is one without needs. No sleep, no objection, no exhaustion, no will of its own. That’s not the description of a partner. It’s the description of a slave.

When you describe a team member and the first quality is “never gets tired”, then your problem isn’t technology. Your problem is that you expect humans to never get tired. AI doesn’t become the ideal because it is so good. It becomes the ideal because humans don’t meet the standard we have silently set.

I’ve worked on teams where the best moments didn’t come from efficiency. They came from friction. From someone who said: that doesn’t make sense. From a break that wasn’t planned. From an objection that threw the whole plan overboard. Those weren’t mistakes, they were the value of the team.

A tool that never pushes back doesn’t deliver better results. It delivers confirmed results. The difference is between a mirror and a counterpart. A mirror shows you what you want to see. A counterpart shows you what you don’t (yet) see.

The metaphor goes further. AI as colleague, as sparring partner. The language is becoming more and more human. But the expectations remain mechanical. Not a sparring partner who challenges or questions you, but a colleague without an opinion.

What bothers me isn’t the AI at all. It’s the image of the human being behind it that’s now becoming visible.

In every company I’ve consulted for, there was the same longing, one that’s never spoken out directly: employees who function. Who don’t make trouble, don’t resist and don’t call in sick. The ideal machine in human form. AI now promises exactly that, literally. And suddenly it becomes visible how humans think about humans.

The sentence “AI is a valuable team member” says more about the company than about the AI. It says: we want output. Not the uncomfortable colleague with a different opinion who is also right about it. We want someone who delivers without asking.

That works for routine tasks. For everything that is standardised and repeatable. For everything else it’s a loss that you don’t see right away. Without friction and resistance, it feels productive. Until the decisions become more and more synthetic and nobody asks questions anymore.

A valuable team member contradicts you when you are wrong. It gets tired when it has worked too much and takes a break, which is often necessary to question and reconsider decisions. Things like that aren’t a bug, they are a value. We have to ask ourselves the question: what do we lose when we get what we always wanted?