AI’s done what it promised. Work is easier. Meetings run tighter. Notes get summarised. Reports are drafted before anyone’s had time to think. A recent Salesforce report found that daily AI use has jumped 233% in just six months with productivity and job satisfaction shooting up with it. Yet, beneath these impressive statistics lies an unspoken shift.

If you’ve noticed your team feels a little flatter, or that meetings end faster but with fewer ideas, you’re not imagining it. Teams are functioning efficiently and delivering greater output, but the buzz is gone. The tools built to make work easier are also making it emptier.

It seems like no one wants to say it out loud because technically, everything’s working. But conversations are becoming more transactional, and the spontaneous, slightly messy moments that used to spark connection are fading.

This isn’t about resisting tech, it is about recognising that AI can’t replace the small, human interactions that build trust and make teams feel like teams. 

More Communication. Less Connection.

AI hasn’t made us silent, it’s made us noisier. We’re more ‘in touch’ than ever: constant pings, instant replies and entire threads wrapped in tidy, polite AI-generated responses.

But you can’t build trust on pre-written prompts and you can’t develop team culture through suggested replies. Some of us communicate all day and still leave work feeling unseen.

In many cases, it’s just content for content’s sake. Think meeting transcripts no one reads, or AI recaps that completely miss the point. More words. More data. Less clarity. We’re not communicating better, we’re just documenting more.

Conversation without consequence isn’t connection. It’s just noise in a nice tone of voice.

Where Did the Messy Moments Go?

AI’s cleaned everything up. Meetings have sharp agendas. Debriefs are transcribed before you’ve even left the call. Notes are categorised and searchable. But in tidying our workflows, we’ve stripped out the most meaningful parts.

• The spontaneous, “Can I quickly show you something?”
• The accidental side conversation that turns into the solution.
• The “Wait, am I the only one confused?” moment (usually followed by five heads nodding and that collective thank god, me too feeling).

These used to happen around the ‘work’. Now, we don’t leave any space for them. Everything’s so structured there’s nowhere for that energy to land. Everyone’s on mute until it’s their turn, followed by a quick click and it’s over, back to the inbox.

And it’s not just these interactions that are missing, it’s the emotion that used to sit inside them. The unspoken things that happened in the room. That slight shift in tone or a changed facial expression. The moment someone took a breath and said something hard, not to criticise, but because they cared enough to say it out loud.

As leaders, this matters more than ever. It might be tempting to let AI handle the hard stuff: to craft the perfect message, soften the feedback, remove the risk. But the ability to navigate difficult conversations, to offer challenge with care, is a skill we still need to practice with our teams, with our peers and especially with each other. 

What do we do now?

We don’t need to scrap AI tools, but we do need to stop assuming they can do the emotional heavy lifting for us. Culture doesn’t survive on output alone. It lives in eye contact, in difficult conversations that don’t get outsourced and in laughter that wasn’t planned.

Connection, like trust, is built in the small, inconvenient moments. The ones that require you to show up not as a function, or a name in the chat, but as a person.

AI won’t destroy your culture, but neglect might. That’s the part we have to take seriously.

At Be Challenged, we don’t see team building as a warm-up or a box to tick. We know that teams that aren’t connected can’t collaborate; no matter how capable they are. We’ve spent years designing programs and creating shared experiences with just the right mix of pressure, problem-solving, and human connection because we know that’s what sticks. That’s what shifts a group of colleagues into an actual team.

So, if your team’s delivering on the surface but real connectedness feels off, that’s where we come in. We help teams reconnect, reset and rediscover what it feels like to move as one.

That’s how your buzz comes back- and that’s the part we’re good at.

Need a hand getting your team back in sync? Reach out to the team today.