The organizations and businesses making the most consequential decisions about AI right now are doing it without a plan.

That’s not just me making a statement, that is what the numbers show.

According to Deloitte's 2026 survey of 3,235 senior leaders, organizations where leadership actively shapes their AI approach achieve significantly greater business value than those handing the work to technical teams alone. Yet handing it to the IT department remains the dominant pattern. The strategic question, namely what does this mean for our people, our structure, and our culture, is being passed down while the rest of the organization waits.

This is a leadership problem and it is producing a very specific kind of damage.

The panic that looks like a plan

Fear of job loss due to AI has nearly doubled in the past year. Fifty-two per cent of workers now say that they are concerned that AI could eventually replace their jobs. At the same time, those same workers are using AI tools daily and finding real value in them. Workers are now more likely to say AI does more harm than good when it comes to jobs, income, and quality of life, a complete reversal from the year before.

(Sources: KPMG American Worker Survey 2025, 2,100 respondents; Jobs for the Future national survey, March 2026)

So people using a tool that they increasingly fear will make them unnecessary are doing exactly what people do when leadership has said nothing useful. They’re winging it because doing something feels better than doing nothing at all.

Meanwhile, organizations are restructuring. Over 30,000 layoffs have been attributed to AI in 2026 alone, following 55,000 in 2025. Yet research shows that AI accounts for only a small fraction of actual job cuts. A December 2025 survey found that 59 per cent of hiring managers admit they blame AI in layoff announcements because it plays better with stakeholders than admitting financial pressure.

(Source: Resume.org survey of 1,000 US hiring managers, December 2025)

The majority of what is being called AI-driven restructuring is, in practice, traditional cost reduction with a more convenient explanation attached to it. Investor Marc Andreessen has been direct: many large companies hired far too many people during the pandemic years and are now correcting that. AI, he said, has become the excuse. "Now they all have the silver bullet excuse. It's AI."

(Source: 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings, March 2026)

This matters because when an organization uses uncertainty as cover for a decision it has already made, it destroys something it cannot easily rebuild: the trust of the people still in the building.

What people are actually searching for

The public conversation is dominated by analysts, forecasters, and technology companies with a commercial interest in a particular version of the future. What individuals are actually asking - in search engines, in AI tools, in workplace surveys - tells a different story.

Just over one-third of workers say that their employer is giving them the training and guidance they need to work with AI which is a drop of almost 10 percentage points from the year before. The conversation that should be happening inside organizations is not happening at the pace or depth the situation demands.

(Source: Jobs for the Future national survey, March 2026)

And here is what makes this worse: 75% of organizations rate their leadership development programmes as not very effective and only 18% say that their leaders are very effective at achieving business goals. This was true before AI arrived because organizations already knew that their leadership development was not working. What AI has done is to make the cost of that failure significantly higher.

(Source: High5Test Leadership Development Statistics 2025)

There is no handbook and that is exactly the point.

Nobody knows how this ends. Stanford's 2026 AI Index reports that AI is moving faster than the policies meant to govern it, the benchmarks designed to measure it, and the job market built to absorb it.

The World Economic Forum projects that AI will displace 92 million roles by 2030 and create 170 million new ones. The IMF calls the impact a tsunami that most organizations are not prepared for. These projections point in different directions because no-one knows where AI is taking us.

(Sources: Stanford 2026 AI Index; WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025; IMF)

Organizations that are restructuring now on the assumption that they know the end state of AI adoption are making bets in conditions that they do not fully understand, and calling them plans.

A note from where I sit

I have spent years working with international organizations - the United Nations system amongst them - on the work that disappears from budgets first: how people communicate under pressure, how they manage conflict and how they keep a team together when the direction is unclear.

I am repositioning now, not because the need for that work has diminished (by every measure it has increased) but because the appetite for funding it in the places I have historically served has contracted sharply. I know what operating under genuine uncertainty feels like from the inside and it isn’t exciting. It is the daily work of making decisions without the information you need, alongside people who are also uncertain, with no reliable map of what comes next.

What I have seen across the years inside complex, cross-cultural environments is that strategy documents do not hold teams together under this kind of pressure. What produces cohesion is the prior work of building the conditions in which people can function, communicate, and make sound decisions even when the certainty they were promised has not arrived.

What you as a leader can do

Every organization or business waiting for the uncertainty to resolve before making decisions about its people is losing time it will never be able to recover. The work now must surely be to create the conditions that allow your teams to function, decide, and deliver without a guaranteed outcome in sight. That means three things.

First, stop delegating the AI question to the technical team. Redesigning how work happens is a leadership decision, not a technology one. It requires people who understand the business, the culture, and the human cost of change to be in that conversation from the beginning. McKinsey's 2025 research identifies workflow redesign as the single factor with the greatest effect on whether AI actually delivers business impact.

Second, take the communication gap seriously. More than half of workers say that their employer is only somewhat transparent about AI plans. It is silence, not uncertainty, that does the real damage.  When leaders do not communicate what is happening, including telling others that they simply don’t yet have the answers, they create a space that fills with assumption and anxiety that serves no one.

Third, recognise that the capabilities organizations are currently cutting investment in are precisely the ones that AI cannot replace. Eighty-six per cent of younger workers say that communication, leadership, and interpersonal skills are more important for their career than many technical skills, including AI skills. The ability to hold a difficult conversation, to manage people through change that they did not choose, or to make sound decisions under pressure – none of those processes are automated, and all of them are currently underdeveloped in most places of work.

(Source: High5Test Leadership Development Statistics 2025)

The cost of reacting before you understand

More than two-thirds of AI initiatives fail to meet expected outcomes;  42 per cent of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17 per cent the year before. Most organizations are not getting the return on their AI investment because the human conditions required to use it well have not been built.

(Source: Fullview AI Statistics 2025)

Most senior leaders are under pressure to move faster on AI adoption, but the harder and more consequential work is to build an organization that can function under conditions that will remain uncertain for years. In turn that requires the investment in people that budget pressure has been steadily removing.

If you are a senior leader who can see the gap between what the transformation plan says and what your teams are actually able to deliver, you are looking at a cohesion problem. That is the work I do with organizations.

Let's have a conversation - Teams With Gwyneth