Last week's issue of Field Notes took on demographics, and the question of why the categories institutions have used to describe their audiences for a generation have stopped predicting anything useful about how those audiences actually behave. The response was generous, and a number of you wrote back with a version of the same follow-up question, which was some variation of: if the frameworks we use to understand the people on the outside of our institutions are breaking down, what about the frameworks we use to lead the people on the inside.
This week's piece is an attempt at part of that answer. It is about what artificial intelligence is doing to the relationship between leaders and the people they lead, and about a leadership failure that almost nobody is naming clearly even though it is producing some of the most consequential workforce anxiety of the decade.
The failure nobody is naming
There is a particular kind of leadership failure happening inside organizations right now that almost nobody is calling by its name. It is not a failure of strategy in the conventional sense, and it is not a failure of technology adoption, and it is not even really a failure of communication, although it gets diagnosed as one most of the time. It is a failure to articulate a deal, and the consequences of that failure are showing up in trust scores, in disengagement, in quiet attrition, and in productivity gains that mysteriously fail to materialize even after the AI tools have been fully rolled out and the training has been fully delivered.
The pattern is familiar to anyone paying attention. A leader stands in front of their team, or sends an all-hands memo, or drops a line in the company chat about how everyone needs to be using AI more, faster, and smarter, and the room nods politely, and then the team goes back to their desks and starts quietly updating their resumes. Not because anyone hates the technology, and not because the staff is resistant to change, but because nobody has actually told them what the deal is, and in the absence of a clear deal, they are doing the math themselves and arriving at the worst possible answer.
Call it evangelism without a compact, and recognize it as one of the most pressing leadership failures of the moment.
The data is unambiguous
The Mercer Global Talent Trends 2026 survey of twelve thousand workers and business leaders found that forty percent of employees now fear losing their job to AI, a sharp jump from twenty-eight percent just two years ago. The KPMG American Worker Survey from late 2025 found that fear of job displacement due to AI has nearly doubled from the previous year, with fifty-two percent of workers now expressing concern that AI could eventually replace their jobs, even as nearly nine in ten reported using AI at least weekly. A national survey from Jobs for the Future, released in March, found that workers are now more likely to say AI is a net-negative than a net-positive when it comes to finding jobs and building wealth, a sentiment that flipped in a single year. Just over one-third of workers say employers are providing the training, guidance, or opportunities they need to use AI in their jobs, a drop of almost ten percentage points from the previous year.
The workforce is anxious and workforce is using these tools anyway. The workforce is not getting much in the way of clarity from the people at the top who are supposed to be leading them through this. That is the gap worth talking about, because many leaders are mistaking enthusiasm for strategy and confusing a mandate with a plan.
The version doing the most damage
The version of this failure that seems to be doing the most damage is the leader who tells their staff to run something through AI to make sense of it, before the staff have even tried to make sense of it themselves, and sometimes before the leader has read the thing at all. There is a flavor of this that is genuinely troubling, which is when a leader is essentially using AI as a stand-in for trusting their own people, asking the model to summarize a memo their direct report wrote, or to evaluate a strategy their team proposed, or to take a first pass at a decision that really ought to be informed by the humans who have been thinking about it for weeks. The signal that sends to the team is not subtle, and it is not the signal the leader thinks they are sending. The signal is that the leader trusts the tool more than the person they are paying, and once a team feels that, it cannot easily be walked back.
The research is sobering on this. A study published in the International Journal of Business Communication found that when supervisors heavily used AI for routine communication tasks, respondents began to question the sender's authorship, confidence, caring, sincerity, and ability. Which is to say, when the boss leans too hard on AI, the team stops trusting the boss. The Center for Creative Leadership makes a parallel point, arguing that AI is destabilizing the foundations of workplace trust at the exact moment organizations need unprecedented levels of trust to adopt it successfully.
The argument the full piece makes from here is that the answer is not more reassurance, and not a better rollout plan, and not another all-hands. It is a compact. Meaning a clear, repeated, specific articulation of what the deal actually is: what AI is for in this organization, what humans are for, what the trade is, and what leadership is committing to do for the people on the other side of the change. The reason this matters, and the reason vague evangelism is doing so much damage, is that staff are going to fill in the silence themselves, and the silence almost never gets filled in with optimism.
How we use this in practice
The compact question is showing up in nearly every advisory engagement we run right now, whether the client is a foundation rethinking its grantmaking communications, a university navigating AI policy across schools, or a newsroom trying to figure out what its editorial workforce should be doing six months from now. At Field Nine Group, the parent company of Adriana Lacy Consulting, the way we have articulated our own compact, and the language repeated internally often enough that the team is probably tired of hearing it, is that AI is the layer and the team is the work. AI handles task assignment and forecasting and first-pass research and the operational drag that historically eats the calendar of a senior strategist. The team handles strategy, design judgment, editorial taste, client relationships, the human-centric work that nobody is paying us for AI to do. The formulation functions less as a slogan than as a cultural anchor the team can hold leadership to.
The TCI framework we wrote about last week tells us who an audience is by the situation they are in. The compact tells the people inside the institution what their situation will be on the other side of the change. Both are answers to the same underlying question, which is what the institution is for, and who it is for, in a moment when the old answers have stopped holding.
If your organization is in the middle of an AI rollout and the conversation has been mostly evangelism so far, our strategic research and advisory retainers are built for exactly this moment. You can learn more about how we work with foundations, universities, newsrooms, and mission-driven organizations at adrianalacyconsulting.com.