America's AI backlash: How the effort to keep worker trust is evolving inside companies

Ah, marvellous. CNBC has surveyed the American people and discovered that 53% of them — across every demographic group, no less, so there is nowhere to hide — fear AI is sharpening a knife for someone in their own household. So much for the reassuring line we heard from Apollo the other week — that AI only trims paychecks, never payrolls. Try telling that to the 53% who are mentally rehearsing which department's headcount will be quietly rebranded as 'efficiency gains' first.

But the real comedy is in the prescribed remedy. 'Trust remains the cornerstone of an ideal AI communication strategy,' the article informs us, in the voice of a PowerPoint that has been on too many courses. The strategy, you see, is to 'let individual teams drive the AI roadmap' so that companies can 'avoid alarming individual contributors.' Alarming them? The entire adult workforce of America is at 53% alarm, and the corporate response is to form a committee to talk about feelings while the robots update their CVs. 'How the effort to keep worker trust is evolving inside companies,' the headline coos — which is executive for 'we have tried nothing and we are all out of ideas.'

There is something almost touching about an approach that treats the AI backlash as a communications problem rather than an employment problem. Don't worry, the logic goes: if we just let each department pick its own automation tools, nobody will notice the aggregate headcount sliding towards zero. One longs for a single executive to stand up and say, 'Yes, we are planning to automate your job, and the roadmap is confidential.' Instead we get trust as a 'cornerstone' and teams 'driving' a roadmap to the exact same destination.