PhD Seminar Series: Selfless Broker: Artificial Intelligence Agent in Interpersonal Communication

Selfless Broker: Artificial Intelligence Agent in Interpersonal Communication

Speaker: Guohao Lin (Bocconi University)

Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping organizational life, yet its implications for the interpersonal communication that underpins collaboration remain relatively unexplored. To theorize how AI may alter human-to-human communication, we draw on the lens of brokerage practices, which explain how actors structure information flows and manage relational dynamics in everyday collaboration. We reason that AI’s capabilities align with the core brokerage practices of connecting and buffering, positioning it to influence both informational alignment and the socioemotional climate of teamwork. Moreover, AI’s non-intentionality may amplify these effects by reducing interpersonal concerns, whereas anthropomorphism may attenuate them by reintroducing expectations associated with human interaction. We will test these ideas through a controlled laboratory experiment designed to examine how AI shapes communication processes and collaborative outcomes, and to identify the conditions under which these effects are constrained. Our work will contribute to research on AI–human collaboration by shifting attention from AI’s direct performance effects to its role in structuring the communicative processes through which collaboration unfolds. It will also extend theories of communication and collaboration by articulating how AI may alter both informational and socioemotional dimensions of interaction. Finally, it will advance brokerage theory by proposing that non-human agents can enact connecting and buffering practices and by theorizing when such enactment is likely to emerge.