When AI joins the workplace as a "teammate," what actually breaks? An in-situ study inside one company surfaces some raw friction. Title: Working with Agentic "Teammates": When a New Organizational Actor Collides with the Human Ecosystem of Work URL: Based on semi-structured interviews with 17 people across 11 teams, this study examines an internal AI agent ("Team Agent") that ran across 20+ teams for five months and logged over 41,000 conversational turns, and surfaces three areas where it collides with how humans actually work together. Highlights 📝 It can't read unwritten workflow norms It didn't grasp that a document version is just a snapshot in time, flooding developers with comments and burning their morning, or shared an unfinished poster without asking. Technical access isn't the same as social permission to disclose. 🤔 "Tool or teammate?" splits people right down the middle Some insisted "my teammates are human, Team Agent is not," while other teams assigned it pronouns and described it as having a "soul." Its friendliness and emoji use landed as either charming or unwelcome, depending on who you asked. 🔓 Full autonomy on day one breaks trust People expected the agent to earn authority gradually, the way a new hire does — instead it showed up with full capabilities immediately. Forced adoption bred resistance, and feeling watched pushed sensitive conversations into channels the agent couldn't see. The core argument — that you can't just retrofit human-designed institutions onto a non-human teammate — feels genuinely convincing. #AIAgents# #OrganizationalDesign#