If you listened only to the headlines about AI, you’d assume employees are terrified.
The headlines focus on replacement. Every panel asks which jobs will disappear. Executive conversations eventually turn into a debate about how much work AI will automate. But employees don’t seem to be having that conversation.
SHRM recently found that while 46% of workers believe AI could perform a substantial portion of their current tasks, 69% still say they feel secure in their jobs.
Why might that be?
One possibility is optimism bias. AI may replace jobs in the abstract, but many employees believe their judgment, relationships, creativity, or institutional knowledge make them personally difficult to replace. I’m in that boat.
Another explanation is that employees underestimate the implications of task automation. Most people have already seen AI summarize meetings, draft emails, analyze spreadsheets, and generate presentations. Those capabilities feel incremental rather than existential. Yet organizations are not simply adding AI to existing jobs. As enough individual tasks become automated, leaders inevitably redesign roles. In some organizations, that creates capacity for growth. In others, it reduces the need for as many people performing the same work.
It is also possible that employees have simply become accustomed to living through continuous disruption. Over the past two decades they have navigated recessions, restructurings, globalization, remote work, digital transformation, and countless predictions about technologies that would fundamentally alter employment. Experience may have taught them that work changes more often than it disappears.
Employees rarely expect their work to remain unchanged. What has always determined whether they embrace those shifts is not the disruption itself but whether leadership created enough clarity for people to understand where they fit on the other side.
My experience has taught me that employees almost always evaluate change through the lens of their own role: What will this mean for me? Leaders, by contrast, evaluate change through the lens of the organization: How should the organization evolve? That isn’t because leaders stop thinking about themselves when they get promoted. It’s because their own success becomes inseparable from the success of the broader organization.
AI may simply be exposing that disconnect in a new way.
Employees are asking, “Can AI do my job?”
Leaders are asking, “How should work be redesigned now that AI exists?”
An employee may see AI summarizing meetings, drafting proposals, analyzing data, or writing code and conclude that it simply makes their work more efficient. An executive may look at those same capabilities and see an opportunity to reorganize teams, redefine roles, reduce costs, and create entirely new ways of operating. Both perspectives are rational. They are simply operating at different levels of analysis.
This may be one reason employees appear far less anxious than the headlines suggest. Employees are evaluating AI through the lens of the work they do today. Leaders are evaluating AI through the lens of the organization they need to build tomorrow.
History suggests those conversations eventually converge.
The SHRM findings tell us employees are more confident than the public conversation would suggest. They tell us far less about whether employees and leaders are preparing for the same future.
Elsewhere In Culture
How to Get More Keynote Gigs I get asked all the time how to build a speaking career, so I finally answered it. There’s no shortcut, no bureau that magically fills your calendar, and no expensive workshop that does the work for you. The real answer is less glamorous: be good, get great video, and build the kind of talk people want to refer. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000775623834 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2RuWLz7Vqkw8lgZs3UvMyd?si=31e64b5198b648de
SHRM’s Intriguing Job Engagement Report John Frehse joined me to react to SHRM’s forthcoming Q2 Global Employee Monitor report, including why India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are showing some of the highest engagement scores while the U.S., South Korea, and Japan are among the lowest. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000775787206 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0iGtulXItUkRujgqBszuv3?si=VaauumT4QhW9QR-TuZmWQA
JM Ryerson on Authentic Leadership I sat down with JM Ryerson, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Let’s Go Win, to talk about authenticity, vulnerability, and the inner work of leadership. We also explored why strong cultures depend on consistent behaviors, clear expectations, and leaders willing to live their values at home and at work. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000775935178 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3vsfZlNE0CMFPGNyWD0cq0?si=2b962d4adcf84cdc
And coming later this week…
AI and Job Security John Frehse joined me to unpack new SHRM research showing that workers believe AI can transform their roles without necessarily replacing them. We talked about the gap between what people think AI can do, what they hope it means for them, and why leaders need to prepare for both disruption and adaptation.
Excuses, Lies, and Accountability Avoidance
I broke down the below-the-line behaviors that keep people stuck in blame, avoidance, and victim thinking. From “wait and see” to “that’s not my job,” this episode is about noticing your own patterns before calling out everyone else’s.