Covert perception of AI adversely impacts team performance and changes physiological dynamics despite human-level AI competence

Collaborating with an expert teammate is generally expected to enhance team performance. However, when the expert is presented as an artificial intelligence (AI) agent, our study reveals a counterintuitive outcome: teams performed worse when a teammate was perceived as AI, especially when task difficulty increased. Using a virtual reality-based sensorimotor task, we observed that the inclusion of a human teammate introduced as an artificial agent disrupted team dynamics, leading to elevated arousal, reduced engagement, and diminished communication intensity among human participants. These effects persisted even as the human teammates’ trust in the AI teammate increased over time. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about the benefits of AI in team settings and highlight the critical need for human-centered AI design to mitigate adverse physiological and behavioral impacts, ensuring more effective human-AI collaboration.