Your employees don’t have AI anxiety. They’re grieving

When it’s your own job that’s changing

What makes Supancich’s perspective particularly resonant is her willingness to turn the lens on herself. When she first encountered the psychologist’s writing on grief, she says, it didn’t just clarify what she was seeing in her employees. It clarified something she recognized in herself.

One of her acknowledged strengths as a people leader is her ability to connect with employees, to read a room, to look someone in the eye. As AI absorbs more operational work and the workforce potentially shifts toward a blend of human and digital employees, she wonders what becomes of that.

“If my employees in the future are not human and I have less of them and work is going so fast that this is a waste of time,” she says, “I’m not going to like that as much. I enjoy this. So, I do think there’s a sense of grief that I feel.”

She identified smaller losses, too. She has noticed that as AI rewrites workplace emails into clean, bulleted language, individual voices are quietly disappearing.

“I know the way that so-and-so writes to me, and at the end he makes a funny joke and there’s an emoji, and that kind of lightens my day,” she said. “I don’t want companies to become just monotone speak.”