A robot joined the team last quarter, and no one was hired to look after the people working next to it. But someone did it anyway.
Maybe it's the shift supervisor who explains the new rules twice, then a third time at the end of the day. Maybe it's the HR partner who gets the quiet question in the corridor: is this the start of something? Maybe it's the safety lead who now answers for a machine's behaviour. None of them applied for this. It just arrived on their desk.
We tend to assume a robot rollout is a technology project with a people footnote. Basically, you buy it, install it and move on. If anyone struggles, that is change management, and HR already does change management.
Darrell West at the Brookings Institution disagrees. In July he argued that organisations will need robot relations departments. His description of the job is worth reading slowly. It would focus on how people in the organisation interact with AI assistants, agents, robots and cobots. It would address human resistance to technological change, deal with people's frustrations, and handle complaints that job descriptions and pay do not reflect people's actual work with robots. He goes further and suggests HR and IT may need to merge to get the right mix of skills.
His sharpest line is about where worry is heading. Employee concerns, he writes, will no longer centre on fellow workers but on interactions with AI agents, cobots and large language models.
Now look at that list again. It does not read like a forecast. It reads like a description of what is already happening, to whoever is nearest.
The research suggests why it is harder than it looks. Yamei Liu and colleagues studied 622 employees at a hotel chain in China. A robot's human-like characteristics pulled in two directions at once. People sabotaged the robot less when working with it felt energising. They sabotaged it more when it felt like a threat to their jobs. This was a hotel study, not a factory floor, so treat it as a signal rather than a verdict. But as machines become more human in shape, someone needs to notice which effect is winning on their team.
Then there is Hyundai. In July, the company's union in Korea began a partial strike over pay and job security, and reports say it also wants a say before Atlas robots enter production. Hyundai says robots are not part of the current talks. Recently, Boston Dynamics opened its Atlas training facility at Hyundai's Georgia plant, as part of a plan for 25,000 units. The technology is moving on schedule. The consent conversation has not caught up. Who owns that conversation inside the company is a fair question, and it is not obviously a technical one.
And, as usual, a job does not disappear just because nobody named it. It falls to the person who cares most, usually without training, authority or credit. Do we set people up for success here? How well that person is supported shapes how well the robot is adopted. And the better robots are adopted, the more chances we have to evolve today's jobs and create new, more creative ones for people in the future.
So before the next rollout, ask a question besides "is the robot ready". Who is doing robot relations here today, and do they know?
Source: West, D.M. (2026). Organizations will need AI and robot relations departments. Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/organizations-will-need-ai-and-robot-relations-departments/