AI agents are not your "coworkers" (technologyreview.com)

If AI agents can handle meeting requests, it could resolve a lot of scheduling conflicts.

I think it's fair to say you can have agent coworkers and human coworkers. When a company adopts a named and gendered coworker product as a "new hire", it probably feels more threatening, like you're introducing a single, named entity to take over 5 people's jobs. Have always thought this functionality is more like an AI computer than an AI coworker, but the category has named itself and I think the vendors and builders of AI coworkers are responsible for how much or how little anthropomorphism is included out of the box.