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AI is changing the economics of work faster than most organizations can adapt. The question isn’t just what technology makes possible. It’s what leaders choose to do with that possibility.
Earlier this month, a developer named Brandon Thomas released ArtCraft: seven free, open-source applications designed to replace some of Adobe’s best-known tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and Lightroom.
Frustrated with subscription fees, he decided to build his own alternatives. With the help of AI, he assembled an entire suite in a matter of days.
His verdict: “Software is over.”
The project attracted enormous attention. Developers rushed to explore it, and technology publications picked up the story. There were caveats, of course. The applications weren’t ready to replace Adobe’s professional tools, and Thomas eventually acknowledged that reaching comparable functionality would take longer than he’d initially suggested.
But the significance wasn’t whether he’d successfully replaced Adobe. It was that one person could attempt something that would have required an entire software company just a few years ago.
And software isn’t the only field experiencing this transformation.
Around the same time, OpenAI reported hundreds of new mathematical results, including work on problems that had challenged researchers for years. The results vary in significance and require further scrutiny, but the pace of AI-assisted discovery has left even experienced mathematicians reconsidering what’s possible.
These developments are extraordinary. They’re also unsettling. Work that once required years of specialized training, significant financial investment, and teams of talented people can increasingly be accomplished by individuals working alongside AI.
And we’re only beginning to understand what that means.
For business leaders, however, the implications are already becoming clear. When technology dramatically reduces the cost of doing something, it creates opportunities that didn’t previously exist. Organizations can accomplish more with fewer resources, pursue new ideas, and operate in ways that were once economically impossible.
But those opportunities also create difficult decisions about the people who perform that work today. And not every leader faces those decisions from the same position.
Not every leader has the same choices
It’s easy to discuss automation and job displacement as though every organization faces the same circumstances. They don’t.
Some businesses are thriving. Others are stable but facing increasing pressure. Still others are struggling to survive. AI may create opportunities for all three, but the choices available to their leaders can be very different.
For organizations that are thriving, AI creates freedom.
Imagine a growing, profitable business discovers it can accomplish substantially more work without increasing its workforce, or that automation can reduce costs that previously consumed a significant portion of its operating budget.
Improving efficiency is responsible. Leaders have obligations to customers, investors, employees, and the long-term health of the organization. But when financial survival isn’t at stake, efficiency creates choices.
Those savings might increase profitability. They might fund new products, expand services, or make the organization more competitive. They might also create opportunities to invest in employees, improve compensation, develop new capabilities, or pursue work that wasn’t previously economically possible.
These aren’t necessarily competing priorities. A thriving organization may have the opportunity to do several of them.
IKEA offers an example of what that choice can look like. When it began handing routine customer questions to an AI assistant in 2021, it retrained about 8,500 call-center employees as remote interior-design advisers, turning a cost it could have cut into a new line of business. (IKEA has since cut office jobs as sales slowed, a reminder that circumstances change. But the choice it made when it had room to choose is the point.)
The question is whether its leaders see their people as participants in that opportunity or simply another cost to reduce.
For organizations that are stable, AI creates time.
Perhaps revenue is growing slowly. Margins are tightening. Competition is increasing. The business isn’t in immediate danger, but leaders recognize that the way work gets done will have to change.
This may be the most difficult position because the pressure is real, but the urgency isn’t always obvious. Leaders can see that certain roles may eventually become unnecessary. They may anticipate reducing headcount as technology improves.
But they also have something valuable: time to prepare.
Many are already using it. In a New York Fed survey of businesses using AI, about a third of service firms had retrained workers because of it, while only about 1% had laid anyone off.
Time to communicate honestly about the direction of the organization. Time to invest in training. Time to help employees discover how their existing knowledge and experience might translate into new responsibilities.
Time to consider attrition, reassignment, and other approaches that might reduce the need for layoffs.
Not every employee will find a new role. Not every organization can afford to retrain everyone. But when leaders can see change coming, waiting until the last possible moment to acknowledge it is itself a decision.
And it may be one of the most consequential decisions they make.
For organizations facing serious decline, AI may offer fewer choices.
Sometimes markets collapse. Customers leave. Costs rise. Investments fail. Sometimes those circumstances are beyond leadership’s control. Sometimes they’re the consequences of decisions leadership made.
Whatever the cause, organizations can reach a point where reducing expenses isn’t optional. Jobs may have to be eliminated to preserve the business and the livelihoods of those who remain.
We shouldn’t pretend otherwise. A leader who refuses to make necessary financial decisions can ultimately harm everyone depending on the organization.
But even when the outcome is unavoidable, the manner in which people experience it isn’t predetermined.
Leaders can communicate truthfully as early as circumstances responsibly allow. They can avoid offering reassurance they know may not be justified. They can explain difficult decisions without hiding behind vague corporate language.
They can provide support where resources permit and treat departing employees with the same respect they expected from them while they were contributing.
The circumstances may limit what leaders can do. They don’t eliminate the responsibility to care about how they do it.
We are stewards of more than money
Every leader is entrusted with resources: financial capital, customer relationships, equipment, technology, and time. Managing those resources responsibly is part of leadership. But organizations are also built through the contributions of people who entrust something of themselves to the work—their knowledge, creativity, relationships, energy, and often years of their lives.
We sometimes describe employment as though it’s a straightforward transaction. An organization pays someone for their time and abilities. The employee performs the work. Either party can eventually end the arrangement.
There’s truth in that description, but it doesn’t tell the entire story.
Organizations routinely ask employees for more than the minimum required by a contract. We ask them to care about the mission, take ownership, make sacrifices when necessary, invest in relationships, solve difficult problems, and help build something meaningful.
We celebrate their loyalty and commitment. And many employees respond by giving their organizations far more than a contractual obligation could ever require.
That commitment creates a responsibility. Not a promise of lifetime employment or an obligation to preserve every role regardless of economic reality, but a responsibility to recognize that the people affected by our decisions aren’t simply numbers on a spreadsheet.
They’re individuals who have entrusted part of their lives to our leadership.
Leadership is stewardship—not just of the resources we’re entrusted with, but of the trust people place in us.
Courageous leadership costs something
It’s easy to talk about people being our greatest asset when business is good. The harder test comes when doing what’s right for people carries a real cost.
Perhaps that cost is financial. It might mean investing in employee development when reducing headcount would produce faster savings, or providing more generous transition support than the organization is legally required to offer.
Or perhaps the cost is simply the discomfort of having an honest conversation.
When leaders know difficult decisions may be approaching, silence can feel safer. We tell ourselves we’re protecting morale, avoiding unnecessary uncertainty, or waiting until we have all the answers.
Sometimes there are legitimate legal, financial, or confidentiality reasons we cannot share everything we know. But there’s a difference between responsible discretion and avoiding an uncomfortable truth. And people often recognize that difference long before leaders are willing to acknowledge it.
None of this is simple. Leaders often face competing responsibilities, imperfect information, and circumstances where no available decision feels entirely right.
Courageous leadership doesn’t require telling everyone everything the moment a concern arises. It requires being honest about what we can share, refusing to offer false assurances, and taking responsibility for decisions rather than hiding behind circumstances or other people.
It also requires recognizing that a financially necessary decision can still be handled poorly.
A layoff may be unavoidable. Humiliation isn’t.
Financial hardship may prevent an organization from offering generous severance. It doesn’t prevent a leader from treating someone with dignity. Uncertainty may make it impossible to promise employees that their jobs are safe. It doesn’t justify telling them everything is fine when leadership knows otherwise.
The courage isn’t simply in making the hard decision. It’s in accepting responsibility for the people who bear its consequences.
The power of human connection
For many people, work is more than a paycheck. It’s where they’ve developed friendships, built confidence, discovered abilities, and found a sense of purpose.
Some of us may place too much of our identity in what we do. Our worth as human beings should never depend entirely on our profession or the organization employing us. But recognizing that truth doesn’t make the loss of meaningful work any less painful.
When someone’s profession is disrupted, they may lose far more than a set of responsibilities. And telling them to adapt, while often practical advice, isn’t sufficient leadership.
Human connection is how we help one another navigate that disruption.
It’s the conversation that helps someone recognize abilities they hadn’t considered transferable. The mentor who creates an opportunity to develop new skills. The leader who involves employees in shaping change rather than simply announcing what will happen to them.
And sometimes it’s the willingness to sit with someone through a difficult outcome that neither person can change.
None of these things guarantees an easy transition. But they matter, because the way we treat people during difficult moments often reveals more about our leadership than anything we say when circumstances are favorable.
People over numbers
One of Leadercast’s first principles is People over numbers. That doesn’t mean ignoring the economics of a decision. It means remembering that the numbers never tell the entire story.
I believe AI represents an extraordinary opportunity. I use these technologies every day. They’ve expanded what I can accomplish, the problems I can solve, and the work I can create. I don’t believe the answer is to resist their development or preserve every existing way of working.
But I also don’t believe that the extraordinary capabilities we’re gaining absolve us of responsibility for the people affected. If anything, they make that responsibility more important.
Brandon Thomas may be right that software, as we’ve known it, is ending. But the ability to accomplish more with fewer people doesn’t tell us what we should do with that ability.
The question facing leaders isn’t whether AI will change the economics of their organizations. It already is.
The question is what they’ll do with the freedom, time, or difficult choices that change creates.
Some will use these capabilities primarily to reduce costs. Others will find opportunities to invest in people, create new kinds of work, and build organizations that couldn’t have existed before. Most will face decisions that aren’t nearly so straightforward.
But as technology changes what organizations can accomplish, it also gives leaders an opportunity to demonstrate what they value.
The technology will keep getting cheaper. Our responsibility to people won’t.
About the author: Robert Laughter is co-founder of D-Three, where he helps organizations grow through strategy, technology, and hands-on execution.
