What happens when organisations say they are collaborating, but continue treating partners just as customers or suppliers?
Our research behind the First Big Myth (see our book Why Managers Don’t Collaborate – Revealing the Myths and Truths shows that this behaviour is already damaging: short-term thinking, resistance to change, lack of leadership, weak trust, over-reliance on technology and the belief that “we’re already working together” are all barriers to genuine collaboration.
Misusing AI can make these behaviours considerably worse.
AI washing reinforces managerial complacency.
Calling basic automation ‘AI-powered’ can create the illusion that collaboration has been transformed when nothing fundamental has changed. Technology becomes a substitute for relationship management rather than an enabler of it.
AI can hide responsibility.
When leaders blame restructuring, job losses or poor performance on ‘AI’, they can avoid confronting the real organisational issues: weak processes, poor governance, inadequate investment or ineffective leadership. This is corporate scapegoating disguised as innovation.
False AI undermines trust.
Hallucinated information, fabricated sources, synthetic content and misleading data insights can quickly damage confidence between partners. Collaboration depends on repeated, positive actions that build trust. AI-generated misinformation does the opposite.
Automation can amplify silo behaviour.
If each organisation deploys AI independently, optimising its own processes and objectives, the technology may actually increase fragmentation. Faster decisions are not necessarily better joint decisions.
AI can intensify short-termism.
Managers already under pressure may use AI to produce rapid answers, reports and recommendations without investing time in understanding the relationship, culture or complexity surrounding the decision. Efficiency becomes the goal rather than shared value creation.
The irony is powerful: AI can automate administration, but it cannot automate trust, leadership, culture or genuine collaboration.
Used well, AI can free people from simple, repetitive work and create more capacity for creativity, innovation and relationship management. Used badly, it simply accelerates the behaviours that caused collaborative relationships to fail in the first place.
The question therefore isn't “Where can we use AI?”
It is: “Are we using AI to strengthen collaboration—or to disguise the fact that we aren't collaborating at all?”