I think it's fair to say you can have agent coworkers and human coworkers. When a company adopts a named and gendered coworker product as a "new hire", it probably feels more threatening, like you're introducing a single, named entity to take over 5 people's jobs. Have always thought this functionality is more like an AI computer than an AI coworker, but the category has named itself and I think the vendors and builders of AI coworkers are responsible for how much or how little anthropomorphism is included out of the box.
If AI agents can handle meeting requests, it could resolve a lot of scheduling conflicts.