Should you say thank you to your AI?

My friends and family gently tease me when I say thank you to my AI. “What’s the point?” they ask. “It doesn’t even read what you write.”

Ever since part of our team at Djtal began working with AI agents every day, the question has been on my mind. My answer is yes, and it plays out in three circles of impact, from the most personal to the widest.

For yourself

I spend my days giving instructions to machines. If I go from “do this for me” to “please do this for me… thank you”, I am the one who changes.

Politeness towards the machine guards against a slow slide: forgetting that the tone we take at the keyboard colours the tone we bring, a few minutes later, to a colleague, a client or our own child.

You thank your AI for your own sake.

For your work

It is tempting to think that polite prompts get better answers. Recent research says the opposite.

A 2025 study (Mind Your Tone, arXiv 2510.04950) compared very polite and very rude prompts on ChatGPT-4o: 84.8% accuracy for the very rude ones, 80.8% for the very polite ones. An earlier study (Yin et al., 2024, arXiv 2402.14531) found more nuanced results depending on the language, but no clear gain from extreme politeness.

So what counts is what the habit reveals about us. How do you talk to your AI when nobody is watching? Now replace ‘your AI’ with ‘your team’.

For other people

In April 2025, a user on X wondered how much OpenAI had lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to its models. Sam Altman replied that it was “tens of millions of dollars well spent”, adding “you never know”.

Turn the argument around. If so many people around the world keep up this habit, to the point that it adds up to tens of millions, it has survived every rational objection. Nobody gets anything out of thanking a machine, and yet people do it. That says something.

What we say to machines shapes what we will say to our children.

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Thanking my AI is for me, for my work and for the people I will speak to afterwards.

And it may well be the least silly thing I do all day.

Are you working with AI agents and wondering how to approach them? Djtal works with executives on these questions. Get in touch.