Your People Are Worried About AI. Is Anyone Talking to Them?

Gallup's latest numbers show 27% of U.S. workers now worry technology will make their job obsolete, the highest since they started asking. For workers under 45 it's one in three. When people are worried and nobody's talking to them, they fill the silence with their own stories, and those stories become your culture.

In this episode I get into what that silence costs you in trust, retention and quiet workarounds. I also cover what leaders can say even when they don't have every answer, and why the message should come from the district manager, with leadership behind them and HR in the room.

One thing to try this week: ask your managers what they're hearing from their teams about AI. If the answer is "nothing," that's your first problem to fix.

A Clarity at Work Ltd. Podcast. More at ClarityAtWork.ca.

A Canadian distributor with 150 people loses its controller of eleven years, can't fill the seat, and buys an AI tool that promises to cover a big chunk of the work. Nobody's being careless. But the tool works differently from the AI most of us know, and that changes what you need to ask before you sign.

In this episode I look at why an AI accounting company built a feature that shows a person every decision the AI made, and why it took a rule to create the demand for it. Agent tools don't hand you a draft to check. They carry out a string of actions over hours or days, and by the time anyone looks, the work is done. So the real question is whether you can reconstruct what happened and why. With Robert Half reporting that 68% of Canadian finance and accounting managers are struggling to hire and keep people, these tools are being sold right where the pressure is highest.

I finish with three questions to bring into any vendor demo: can my team explain a single decision six months from now, what happens to our data, and who on our side owns what this tool produces.

A Clarity at Work Ltd. Podcast. More at ClarityAtWork.ca.

When AI Goes Wrong, HR Gets the Bill.

Most organizations build AI governance backwards. Legal and IT write the rules, someone drafts a policy, and HR gets a call at the end to train people or collect signatures. By then the tools are live, the roles have shifted and the accountability gaps are already baked in.

In this episode I look at who actually sits at the AI table. SHRM's 2026 research found about half of organizations don't involve HR in AI strategy at all. Deloitte found boards talk to the CIO or CTO about AI 72% of the time and the CHRO just 5%. When something goes wrong, it rarely shows up in a server log first. It shows up as a hiring decision nobody can explain, a performance score nobody can defend, or a shadow tool someone installed because the official path was too slow.

I finish with four things to change: bring HR in before the contract is signed, write AI accountability into real jobs, connect AI use to how you manage performance, and stop treating governance as a tax on innovation.

A Clarity at Work Ltd. Podcast. More at ClarityAtWork.ca.