“A Parrot on the Shoulder”: Designing AI as a Complementary Actor with Perceived Strengths and Weaknesses Within the Mentorship Ecosystem

Workplace mentorship supports professional development but is labor-intensive and cognitively demanding. We interviewed 20 workplace leaders with mentoring responsibilities and regular use of artificial intelligence (AI) to examine how it could complement human mentorship. Participants anticipated that AI could provide timely, comparatively impartial guidance but would remain limited in empathy, motivation, sponsorship, and organizational advocacy. They identified integrity, industry expertise, and accountability as requirements for credible AI mentorship. We conceptualize AI as a complementary actor within a distributed mentorship ecosystem and propose a structural power paradox: AI’s perceived lack of organizational authority may reduce the social-evaluative stakes of help-seeking while constraining its capacity to create career opportunities. We further identify design affordances, including adjustable intervention, role disclosure, uncertainty communication, consent controls, and human handoff, that could preserve mentee agency and allocate mentoring functions across human and AI actors. These findings provide a conceptual framework for designing distributed human–AI mentorship.