New AI assistants, agents, copilots, cobots, and autonomous workplace assistants are joining every role in every industry. As boundaries between AI tools and AI collaborators blur, we outline how to think about these tools now — not yet as AI coworkers but as tools with coworker-like abilities. We use onboarding as a test case to see if considering these tools as having coworker-like attributes is useful, because human psychology makes this eventual collapsing of boundaries inevitable. We don’t yet recommend that companies position their AI tools as personified entities with names and employee ID numbers, but we explain how to prepare for the day (as soon as 2030) when it becomes more common.