Today, AI at work mostly lives in a chatbot's text box. Yet, when we communicate with colleagues, we rarely do it through one format: We write, talk, watch, and listen to them, and often meet face-to-face if the situation requires it.
AI will follow the same path, mimicking multiple communication methods, not just written text. As a result, work meetings with colleague-like avatars are about to become a new way to work, leading to human-to-AI interactions that will feel much more like the interactions we have with each other.
We won't always open a chat window and type a prompt. Increasingly, we'll have meetings with avatars that can see us, speak to us, remember context, respond in real time, and take actions afterwards to help us work better.
To make interactions more meaningful and personal, some of those avatars will look and sound just like our coworkers. For example, your avatar could brief your team while you're in another meeting or a sales leader could coach hundreds of people without the hassle of scheduling any training calls. Knowledge that currently depends on getting time in someone's calendar could become available whenever it is needed.
That changes the economics of communication at work: Human attention is scarce, but an avatar's availability isn't. Many of the conversations we schedule today because there is no alternative will become easier to delegate to our interactive avatars. However technology shapes the future, humans will stay central to running any business—and as the way we interact with machines keeps evolving, it will come to mirror the human experience more and more.
The interesting consequence is that human interaction will become more valuable, not less. Because when information and routine conversations can happen on demand, choosing to spend time with another person carries more meaning.
If we get it right, AI will make interacting with technology feel increasingly more human. And precisely because of that, real human interaction will become easier to distinguish and harder to replace.
