This week another round of cuts landed, with Ubisoft removing more than 380 roles on June 10 and Papa Johns trimming seven percent of its corporate staff a day later. The same week, Mercer reported that ninety-nine percent of CEOs expect AI-driven layoffs inside two years while only thirty-two percent believe their workforce can actually combine human and machine work well. Read those two numbers together and the signal is plain. Leaders are confident about removing people and unsure about leading the ones who remain.
The cost is already showing up in the room. The share of employees who say they are thriving at work fell to forty-four percent this year, down from sixty-six percent in 2024, and a Raconteur survey found that a third of workers say AI-generated communication erodes their leader's credibility, more than double the share who say it helps. When a manager hands the hardest conversations to a chatbot, the staff member does not feel managed. They feel processed.
The implication for anyone running an organization is uncomfortable and specific. The work AI is best at, drafting, summarizing, optimizing, is not the work that builds trust. The work that builds trust, the direct conversation about expectations, the visible presence when a team is anxious, the willingness to deliver hard news in person, is exactly the work leaders are quietly outsourcing first. Efficiency is being purchased with credibility, and the trade is not yet on anyone's balance sheet.
So the question to sit with today is not how much of your communication AI can carry. It is which conversations your people would notice you stopped having yourself, and what they would conclude about you when they did.