Workers are starting to project personalities on to software programs by giving them female names, talking to them and even giving up the window seat as flesh-and-blood employees adjust to sharing the office with bots.
As artificial intelligence invades the workplace, people are learning to live with their new robot counterparts, even though their own jobs might be next for the chopping block.
Staff at back-office operations for ANZ bank in Bangalore have given their new colleagues softer female names such as Lakshmi, while employees at Nippon Life Insurance Company in Japan call them robomi-chan, or “pretty little robot”. In London, workers at insurance processing company Xchanging have named one of their bots Poppy.