Organisations hire brilliant people, then lock them out of AI strategies. Here is why removing employee agency guarantees failure during disruption – and how HR can fix it with these five tips.
Every organisation says its people are its greatest asset. You recruited them for their expertise and paid a premium for it. Then AI arrives, restructures roll out, and those same brilliant people are suddenly kept in the dark, as if they can’t be trusted with the truth about their futures.
Most HR leaders know this principle well: people don’t resist change, they resist loss. In my 36 years working in HR, talent and career development, I’ve watched organisations make the same mistakes again and again during disruption. With AI rapidly reshaping knowledge work done by professionals, those mistakes are getting more expensive.
I see four key mistakes organisations are making as they deploy AI in their businesses:
Mistake 1: Removing agency
Change is done to people, not with them. Decisions about roles, reskilling and redeployment are made behind closed doors, then announced as done deals, often with outplacement already arranged. Employees are processed through a change management program rather than given genuine choices. When people have no agency, they don’t adapt. They freeze, resist, or simply start looking for better work opportunities elsewhere.
Mistake 2: Leaving out the people who know the work
Your subject matter experts know which parts of their work AI can do well and which it can’t. They know where the risks, workarounds and hidden value exist. Yet they’re rarely consulted when automation decisions are made. HR often isn’t either. You’re redesigning work without the people who understand it best.
“For an experienced professional, watching their role shrink and themselves become invisible means losing identity, credibility and certainty.”
Mistake 3: Patronising them
Workforce optimisation platforms now break work into discrete tasks and sort them into machine, human-machine or human-only.
It’s a reductionist view of capability and expertise. Then, to keep people motivated, organisations hand out skills badges: learn this, earn that. It’s the workplace equivalent of a pat on the head and a doggy treat for performing a trick. And the treat isn’t even portable. The moment someone leaves, those badges are worth nothing. That isn’t just demoralising, it’s poor strategy.
Mistake 4: Skipping the psychological work
Most AI programs start with the tech deployment, then the capability build. Yet widely cited McKinsey research suggests only around 30% of change programs succeed, and that employee resistance and unsupportive management behaviour account for more than 70% of the failures. Adoption, or resistance, is a psychological process, and it must be addressed first, with the capability build being addressed second.
For an experienced professional, watching their role shrink and themselves become invisible means losing identity, credibility and certainty. They go from subject matter expert to ‘to be determined.’ That’s grief, and grief doesn’t follow a project plan.
The current solutions – an EAP provider who doesn’t understand emerging work structures, or an outplacement provider that ‘doesn’t do counselling’ and opens with ‘let’s update your resume’ – won’t cut it when someone realises it’s their income runway being displaced by automation.
But what does good look like? Doing this well doesn’t require a bigger budget. It requires a fundamentally different orientation to engage people’s heads and hearts.
The five things that HR can do include:
- Claim your seat at the table. Don’t wait to be invited into AI and automation decisions. Ask for a central role in shaping workplace transformation decisions from the start, before the technology is chosen, not after it’s deployed. The McKinsey numbers are your business case: if people issues drive most change failures, then people expertise belongs in the room where the change is designed.
- Be transparent early. If you keep people in the dark, they’ll find a torch and work it out themselves, and you may not like the story they piece together.
- Involve people in redesigning their own work. Ask your experts where AI helps, where it hurts, and what only humans can do. Better still, let them lead the disruption of their own roles, in collaboration with you.
- Give people ownership of their development. Fund tools and support that belong to the individual, so they can assess their own disruption risk and build a path forward, inside your organisation or beyond it.
- Address the fear before the training. Help people shift their relationship with technology from fear and anxiety to advantage, so they see themselves not as disempowered passive recipients of disruption, but as empowered enablers of change. In short, your brightest and your best become the disruptors.
Which leaves one big question for everyone leading HR: If brilliant people, amplified by technology, are your competitive advantage, then before you begin your next change program, ask yourself: are we treating our people as the brilliant professionals we hired, or as headcount to be reduced in stages?
The answer will shape not just how people leave, but whether the ones who stay still believe in you.
Pamela Frost is the Founder and CEO of Adapt and Thrive an AI-powered career navigation platform helping professionals stay relevant, resilient and future-ready as AI transforms work.
