Your employees don't have AI anxiety. They're grieving

When Kristin Supancich, Chief People Officer at Ahead, sat down with an engineer who had spent three decades tinkering with network infrastructure, she wasn't expecting an insight that would reshape how she thinks about AI adoption. The engineer wasn't angry, and he wasn't afraid. He just missed his work.

"I've been an engineer for 30 years," he told her. "I love tinkering. I love being in it. I like to watch how it's happening. And I don't trust it [AI] yet. And I miss the tinkering."

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His job still existed, his role was still meaningful, but the part that had given him pleasure and identity for decades was gone. An AI agent now did the tinkering. He read the output.

For Supancich, the conversation crystalized something she'd been sensing. What if the resistance HR leaders are encountering in AI rollouts isn't really about fear of being replaced, but about something more emotional? She had recently come across work by a psychologist exploring exactly that idea.

"The concept was that people are leaving what they knew for so long and what they found joy in," she said. "So, while they're excited about the future, maybe the anxiety is not about job loss, but it's about grieving something that they're losing that they really enjoyed."

It's a reframe with real implications for how HR professionals support their people through transformation.

Listening before leading

That grief, Supancich has found, tends to show up in the quieter corners of an organization.

At Ahead, an enterprise cloud solution and IT services provider, engineers and salespeople have largely embraced AI tools with enthusiasm. But in pockets of the business built around process-driven, repetitive tasks, the response has been different, more hesitant, and in ways that mirror the very dynamic she'd read about.

"My hypothesis is that people have done that job for a long time and they like the step, step, step process," she says. "The thought of reimagining: ‘what would I do if I didn't do this stuff?’ We probably have some work there on the human side."

Her approach to that work isn't to push harder or add more training. It's to listen. She's been encouraging Ahead's senior leaders to resist the instinct to reassure and instead create real space for people to voice what's worrying them.

"If someone's not embracing it, instead of using the stick, it's like, let's talk about what's making you nervous," she said. "Let me give you the realities of what's really going to happen versus the fear of the unknown."

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She's also candid that fear of job loss is real and shouldn't be brushed aside. Employees are reading the headlines, she notes, and "I would be naive if there wasn't a little bit of fear in there."

But she believes the grief framing opens a more honest conversation, one that gets closer to what people are actually experiencing.

The results of Ahead's most recent engagement survey suggest the listening-first approach is paying off. Four AI-specific questions, covering leader support, daily usage, and confidence with the tools, all scored in the 80th percentile.

"I was actually really excited and quite amazed at how high it was," Supancich said.

The survey results suggest the approach is working. What came first, though, wasn't a training program. It was listening.

When it's your own job that's changing

What makes Supancich's perspective particularly resonant is her willingness to turn the lens on herself. When she first encountered the psychologist's writing on grief, she says, it didn't just clarify what she was seeing in her employees. It clarified something she recognized in herself.

One of her acknowledged strengths as a people leader is her ability to connect with employees, to read a room, to look someone in the eye. As AI absorbs more operational work and the workforce potentially shifts toward a blend of human and digital employees, she wonders what becomes of that.

"If my employees in the future are not human and I have less of them and work is going so fast that this is a waste of time," she says, "I'm not going to like that as much. I enjoy this. So, I do think there's a sense of grief that I feel."

She identified smaller losses, too. She has noticed that as AI rewrites workplace emails into clean, bulleted language, individual voices are quietly disappearing.

"I know the way that so-and-so writes to me, and at the end he makes a funny joke and there's an emoji, and that kind of lightens my day," she said. "I don't want companies to become just monotone speak."

It's a minor thing, she says, but it's still something she will miss.

Supancich has had to learn to sit with that discomfort rather than push past it. During the COVID pandemic, she found herself fielding questions about communicable disease protocols and physical distancing guidelines, territory that had nothing to do with her HR background. Now, navigating AI infrastructure feels like another version of the same thing: a role quietly expanding into places she never trained for.

"I didn't know I needed to be a doctor," she said. "I also didn’t know that I had to be an infrastructure engineer. I know more than I thought I could, and I need to know a lot more."

How to lead people through loss

Supancich’s advice starts with acknowledgment, sitting with what people are losing before trying to move them forward.

"We not only lead in the transformation," she said, "but we're going to have to hear these things and then help people make the transition from grief to back to excitement again, just like all the stages of change."

The reframe, as she sees it, isn't about minimizing what's being lost. It's about helping people find meaning in what their work is becoming and trusting that the excitement will follow once the grief has been heard.

Change has always involved loss, Supancich notes, but the losses this time are quieter and more personal, tied not to jobs disappearing but to the parts of work that gave people identity and joy. Naming that honestly, she believes, is what makes the transition possible. It's also, perhaps, where the real work of HR leadership begins.