By Caroline Dell, Co-founder & CEO of Goodword

Lately I've been talking to a lot of professionals, self-described "super connectors," about what it means to be a human in the AI world we're living in. One of the biggest fears that keeps coming up: losing our friends.

I grew up in a time when "work spouse" was a badge worn proudly. You spent 9am to 6pm, sometimes longer, five days a week in person in the office. You went out with colleagues for lunch, to grab coffee. At LOLA, we had "W(h)ine Not Wednesdays." We'd congregate over a glass of wine and commiserate over the challenges of the week.

These moments bonded us. They created a shared fabric, a common identity, a time when we discovered each other's interests, hobbies, siblings' names, backstories. Our lives outside the four walls of work.

And looking at my wedding guest list, it showed. Work friends had become real friends.

My wedding was one of the happiest days of my life. After a nearly four year engagement (thanks COVID) we gathered 79 guests in the fall of 2022 among 5 tables: the wedding party, my family, his family, a table from college, and our work friends.

Among the "work friends": one from Bain, my very first job. Three of my closest colleagues from LOLA, one of whom was a bridesmaid and is now the CEO of a well known beauty company. The kind of friend you can call any day, anytime, no scheduling required, because she was standing next to me at the altar. Two of the founding employees from Chief. One of them brought a film camera and took some of the most epic pictures of the night. She was also my "something borrowed": a pair of pearl earrings she'd worn at her own wedding.

These weren't just guests at a wedding. These were the people who had already shaped my career, and who kept shaping it long after the toasts ended. One of my LOLA colleagues went on to write me an angel check when I decided to build something of my own. The Bain friend happened to be a venture capitalist. When I asked him for great people for our fundraise, his one and only intro became our lead investor.

Career changing friends.

And on the giving side: one wedding attendee is my go-to referral whenever people need startup revenue advice. (I also refer her to every startup, even though she's not on the job market. I say her name when she's not in the room. Because that's what friends do.)

It's a feeling a lot of us are having right now. Trapped behind our screens, chatting daily with our AI buddies. Claude, Codex, Gemini, pick your favorite. I've personally got Claude Cowork and Codex (also now called ChatGPT Work). I'm constantly kicking off jobs with my agents, Ellie Einstein, Polly Product, Dexter Data. Yes, they have names. They have jobs, sometimes it even feels like they have personalities.

The result? The entity I talk to most is not human. It can't come to my wedding. It can't lend me their pearls. It can't write an angel check. And it can't make the one introduction that unlocks everything.

There's so much AI can do. But it cannot be my friend.

Companies, public and private, are being rewarded for cutting headcount, optimizing for efficiency, reducing staff and increasing AI usage. Our financial motivations are divorced from our human ones. Meanwhile, a meaningful share of white collar work has stayed remote, a trade-off we've made for efficiency, for comfort, for the ease of doing laundry between Zoom meetings. But we've lost the quick coffee run, the small moment of "hey, how was your weekend?" in the hallway.

We are more connected than any generation before us, and lonelier for it.

I believe this will be one of the great paradoxes of our time: how much of our lives do we outsource to AI?

My fundamental belief is that you can't outsource the human stuff.

Relationships matter. Look at the data. Researchers have found that strong social relationships predict a longer life about as powerfully as quitting smoking, more than diet, more than exercise (Holt-Lunstad et al., PLoS Medicine). Yet today, adults under 50 say they often feel lonely at more than twice the rate of those 50 and older (Pew Research Center, Men, Women and Social Connections). People aged 15 to 29 spent 45% more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2010 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, via Our World in Data).

Relationships don't stop at the digital doors of work. They shouldn't. We spend the vast majority of our waking hours there. Are we really ready to give up all our work friends?

We deserve more.

Research on relationships by Robin Dunbar at Oxford has shown that humans can maintain only about 150 stable relationships. The number gets smaller the closer you get:

Our brains have limited capacity to hold onto the people we've worked with over years and decades. The world feels like it's spinning faster now, and I have to wonder if these numbers are getting even smaller. We care about more people than we can consistently keep track of, especially as our lives and networks grow.

What if, instead of technology taking our time and attention away from the humans we cared about, it gave us that back? What if 150 turned into 1,500? You could be reminded of the details that mattered, the moment they matter: their work anniversary, their birthday, the name of their partner or their kid or their dog, the conversation you had over coffee about what was actually going on in their life.

What if that technology also helped you stay in touch when you both moved on, so former colleagues didn't, by default, become former friends? It notified you of the big things: job changes, marriages, babies, the move from corporate to fractional, from startup employee to startup founder.

And what if it did the same for you? It helped you stay relevant not because you had to post, broadcast style, to an audience you built with cringe-worthy content chasing the algorithm. What if, in the normal course of your life, in your emails, your meeting note transcripts, your Slack messages, the events you actually showed up to, there was something keeping track of your career milestones, your major moments, your big goals, and helping others keep track too?

We surveyed over 500 professionals for Goodword's State of Human Connection report, and 81% said the same thing: they regretted not keeping in touch. Not because they didn't care. Because life got in the way. Read the full report here.

That's our vision at Goodword: technology that strengthens human relationships instead of replacing them. I don't know about you, but I'd like my AI to help me have more friends, not be my only friend.

See what we're building at Goodword →

— Caroline