As with much of the global workforce, AI is replacing workers in China, but the scale at which employers have workers training their replacements is causing concerns to escalate among the workforce. According to a new report in MIT Technology Review, earlier this month, a GitHub project called Colleague Skill gained notoriety as a way to simplify the process of creating AI “doubles” for employees.
The viral project allowed workers to extract the skills and personality traits of their colleagues and duplicate them in the form of an AI agent at work. While the project wasn’t a serious one, many workers have since spoken up about employers doing something similar, documenting employee workflows in the hope of recreating them through artificial intelligence. As is evident, AI continues to complicate the dynamics within the workforce in 2026.
With AI replacing workers in China, some are even considering creating AI doubles to automate their colleagues in hopes of evading layoffs. (Image: Freepik)
AI Is Replacing Workers in China as Employers Encourage Employees to Train Their Replacements
Colleague Skill started as a joke, created by Tianyi Zhou as a way to bring attention to the AI-focused layoffs and the increasing trend of companies asking workers to make themselves redundant. According to MIT Technology Review’s deep dive into this trend, the Colleague Skill project allows workers to set up a profile for their colleague and add basic details first. It then imports the chat history and files from popular Chinese workplace applications, such as Lark and DingTalk. The tool can then create a manual of the coworker’s duties, habits, and workflows, which can be imitated by an AI agent.
If the idea of creating a digital clone of someone sounds unnerving to you, you’ll find us in agreement with your assessment. It’s possible to approach this as a lighthearted trend of gaining a new productive colleague without all the chatter and noise that comes with dealing with a real human. However, the idea of replacing your colleagues before you create a replacement for yourself still doesn’t bode well for the workplace.
Prior reports have suggested that employees are hoarding and gatekeeping knowledge on AI technology in order to stay one step ahead of coworkers. Such reports make it clear that there is a growing sense of animosity in the workplace, one that’s tearing away at the fragments of camaraderie that remain. In an attempt to preserve their own jobs, employees are turning to AI, hoping it will replace colleagues and sabotage others in the off-chance that their management will spare them when layoffs arrive again.
Workers Are Resisting AI Automation, Even as They Attempt to Build Their Own Repertoire of AI Skills
AI is indeed replacing workers in China, even if employers aren’t necessarily using tools like Colleague Skill to ask workers to duplicate each other. Many have turned to tools like OpenClaw and Claude Code to ask workers to document their workflows and create clear paths for employees to teach AI agents how to perform their jobs. There is obvious evidence of this in the U.S. as well. Meta recently announced plans to ramp up its employee monitoring strategy to document employee keystrokes, mouse movements, and clicks as they worked as a way to teach AI agents how to perform simple behaviors such as navigating a drop-down menu.
While organizations aren’t openly claiming to train AI to replace jobs, and instead suggest that this is merely a way to optimize AI agents to act as better co-workers, the implications are clear. Whether employees create AI doubles of themselves or their colleagues, the workplace is straining under the pressures of this technology. This is despite evidence to suggest that AI tools are not the perfect assistance that AI providers deem them to be.
Many companies are now rehiring employees who were laid off in favor of AI due to the gaps in their operations that were opened up by this approach. Deloitte landed itself in hot water when AI hallucinations skewed some of the data in its reports. Law firm Sullivan & Cromwell recently issued an apology after it was caught submitting a filing with AI hallucinations. These incidents only mark the issues with the technology that have been caught in time and brought to light.
Employers Continue to Make a Case for AI Agents at Work
Despite these downsides to the technology, when companies like Amazon, Salesforce, and Microsoft claim that AI tools are writing a significant chunk of their code, or when big names like Wells Fargo build AI agents into their operations, it’s hard not to see the appeal of the technology. Artificial intelligence is changing how we operate, and as these tools gather more data and training, they will only grow more efficient and capable of operating independently.
That said, it is important to remember that rushing headfirst into adoption is hardly a smart strategy. Convincing workers to train their own AI replacements is hardly an above-board move, and it can have repercussions of its own. As the MIT Tech report highlights, workers have also come up with countermeasures to sabotage this process and create inferior-quality AI agents. Others may soon come up with their own ways to ensure that the technology doesn’t advance in any notable way, adding roadblocks to a company’s AI adoption strategy.
The ethics of AI in the workplace, the data privacy concerns that surround it, and its resulting impact on jobs aren’t being studied quite as closely as the impact of AI on productivity and efficiency. Considering the global presence and relevance of this technology, this comes as no surprise, as efforts are mostly centered around capitalizing on its capabilities. In time, we expect to see more conversations around the long-term effects of AI use and its ability to “dumb down” a workforce rather than equip them with long-lasting skills, but that day needs to arrive sooner rather than later.
What do you think about this report of AI replacing workers and the reaction of employees in China attempting to protect themselves amidst this change? Share your thoughts in the comments. Subscribe to The HR Digest for more insights on workplace trends, layoffs, and what to expect with the advent of AI.
