Automation reality: AI job losses are a leadership failure, not a technology problem

But history is clear. Technology itself does not determine outcomes. People with power do. Leadership does. Guns don’t kill people; people do. AI doesn’t destroy jobs; CEOs do.

Right now, far too many leaders are using AI in the most crude and unimaginative way possible—as a chainsaw to cut costs, automate roles and discard people. Layoffs are announced as “efficiency gains.” Stock prices jump. Executives congratulate themselves for being “AI-first.”

And then the real costs begin to surface. Consider cases like Klarna, which publicly celebrated replacing thousands of customer service roles with AI, only to later acknowledge that customer experience had suffered and human support had to be rebuilt.

This is becoming a familiar pattern: automate aggressively, hollow out capability and then, as problems surface, quietly reverse course. This is not strategic leadership. It is short-term cost engineering and opportunism masquerading as innovation. Used carelessly, AI will trigger two crises at once.

The first is within organizations. When employees see AI deployed primarily as a job-destruction tool, trust collapses. Fear replaces initiative. Creativity gives way to compliance. The very people companies will need most—adaptable, committed, high-judgment talent—either disengage or leave.

The second crisis is societal. Large-scale job displacement without reskilling, redeployment or dignity will deepen inequality and fuel a backlash—political, cultural and economic. We have seen this before with globalization and automation. AI will simply accelerate the consequences.

The irony is that companies using AI purely to reduce headcount are often weakening themselves. They trade long-term capability for short-term margin improvement—and call it progress.

Fortunately, some companies are showing there is another way. Take Ikea. It has deployed AI to support—not shrink—frontline roles, using it to improve personalization, inventory accuracy and decision support, while shifting employees towards higher-value customer interaction.

The goal is not fewer humans, but more effective ones. The payoff is higher productivity and stronger customer loyalty.

Schneider Electric embeds AI directly into the daily workflows of engineers, plant managers and sales teams—using predictive insights to improve uptime, energy efficiency and customer outcomes. AI becomes a force multiplier for human expertise, driving innovation and sustainability—not a substitute for judgment and experience.

DBS has paired automation with large-scale reskilling, upgrading thousands of roles. So AI replaced tasks, not people. The result is one of Asia’s most resilient financial institutions, often described as a “tech company with a banking licence.”

ServiceNow captures this philosophy in a simple phrase: put AI to work for people. Its platforms are designed on a clear principle: remove drudgery but not judgment, ownership or accountability—so humans can focus on problem-solving, creativity and service.

Then there is Zoho, which has built world-class AI capabilities alongside internal talent development and job creation, including in smaller towns. It demonstrates that long-term competitiveness in technology can be built through talent development rather than periodic waves of layoffs.

These companies are not being idealistic or charitable. They are being smart. They understand that sustainable advantage comes not just from cost structures, but culture and capabilities—from people who trust the organization, understand the business and are empowered by technology rather than threatened by it.

AI is not merely a technology decision. It is a leadership decision. Boards and CEOs must ask better questions than, “How many jobs can we automate?” The more important questions are:

How can AI make our people dramatically more effective? How do we reinvent our business model using AI? How do we reskill and redeploy people at scale? How do we deploy AI in a way that strengthens trust with employees, customers and society?

Using AI responsibly requires imagination, patience and moral courage. It means resisting the temptation to impress markets with headline-grabbing layoffs and instead investing in long-term capability-building. This is harder than cutting costs. But it is the work leaders are paid to do.

Twenty years from now, how will we be judged? Will people look back and admire the additional profits we extracted? Or are they likely to ask a different set of questions:

Did the leaders of today get AI right? Did they use this extraordinary technology with wisdom—or with fear and haste? What kind of companies did they build? What kind of world did they leave behind?

These are not philosophical questions, but of leadership. So let’s not just implement AI, we must humanize it. Create organizations where AI amplifies people and not replace them; where people are trusted, reskilled and empowered to do work of greater value.

The real measure of leadership will not be how much we optimized or automated. It will be how much we uplifted people.

The author is a chair of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet and a former chairman of Microsoft India.