Are AI Avatars the Future of Remote Working?

Having a digital avatar is no new feat. With the likes of Bitmojis, personalised emoticons, and The Sims games, the concept of creating a virtual lookalike hasn’t come out of thin air.

But with the world of work becoming increasingly digital, especially in the wake of hybrid and remote working, this begs the question just what role a digital avatar of oneself might play.

For one thing, we know that the metaverse boasts for its users to create their own avatars which they can control using virtual reality technology. The idea is for employees to be able to attend a digital office, surrounded by other digital versions of their colleagues, whilst still working from the comfort of home. Whilst the metaverse has since lost some of its traction, discussions around the possibilities of having AI-powered avatars have continued to gain momentum.

Most notably, founder and chief executive of Zoom, Eric Yuan, believes that in as little as five years’ time, employees could be sending their AI avatars to Zoom meetings in place of themselves.

This is based on the idea that employees would have their own ‘large language model (LLM)’, which essentially uses the underlying services of AI tools like ChatGPT to train the model on their individual speech and behaviour patterns which would allow the avatars to generate accurate and personalised responses to queries and requests.

This may sound like the plot of a futuristic sci-fi movie, but the concept of having AI mimic us isn’t as foreign as you might think. After all, Gmail has an inbuilt AI tool which can summarise and suggest replies to emails based on previous conversation points and common phrasing that the user uses.

However, despite the fact that LLMs can do passable impressions of people, there is no evidence to suggest that they can actually do useful work on behalf of someone. Not to mention the fact that if an AI version of an employee is doing their job for them, at what point does the human employee behind the avatar no longer become useful? Should an employer pay someone when their virtual counterpart is doing the brunt of the work?

On top of this, having an avatar attend meetings runs the risk of completely losing any possibility of fostering friendships and connections at work.

Whilst AI technology enables employees to work smarter and optimize their skills, are AI avatars one step too far in this technological evolution?