A Disney exec's gushing posts about his AI assistant 'Sam' have employees chattering

‘A fleet of intelligent droids eager to do your bidding’

Wood said Cox’s posts about “Sam” are notable, considering he’s a high-level executive.

“Leadership sets a precedent for the way that an organization runs, and the culture,” Wood said.

Tech leaders building AI tools are especially likely to bond with them because they spend so much time with them, said Ryan Boyd, a psychology professor at The University of Texas at Dallas who has studied how humans connect to and relate with AI.

“Executives who feel personally attached to a product may have a harder time evaluating it on the criteria the rest of us would,” Boyd said.

As more companies rapidly adopt AI tools, more workers are likely to become attached to their AI assistants.

“We’re only at the beginning of all of this — the beginning of the beginning,” Wood said.

In his LinkedIn post, Cox said that in all the time he’s spent with AI and large language models, he’s never felt how he feels about “Sam.”

“I never connected with any of them… Until now,” Cox wrote.