All the AI hype and eager investment has many workers anxiously wondering, “Will AI take my job? And are my bosses secretly salivating at the idea of reducing headcount to basically zero and running a productive team of superintelligent agents at a fraction of the cost?”
Maybe it’s not all so simple and sinister, but without a clear internal communications strategy related to the ongoing AI transformation, it’s possible employees may wonder if it is.
“This topic, actually, has taken on its own identity because people make the association to literally, like, Will Smith’s I, Robot and they hear what Elon is saying out in the market and there’s this assumption that the machines are going to come in and literally start doing the jobs,” said David Maffei, SVP & GM at internal communications platform Staffbase.
Maffei suggested that technology has, historically, upended the workplace. He pointed to the adoption of the mainframe computer or the cloud as recent examples of tech that led to some worker displacement–—though at the time, anxiety over robots replacing human jobs wasn’t so pronounced.
“No one at that time was saying that the mainframe was stealing their jobs. No one was saying that Microsoft’s tooling in the early 2000s was stealing their jobs,” he said.
But AI feels like it could take our jobs because its capabilities are evident to us in our personal life as much as our professional life.
A February Pew Research Center survey found more than half of employees are worried about the future impact of AI, and 32% believe the technology “will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the long run.”
While clear data on AI’s present and future impact on jobs remains inconclusive, an analysis of Q2 2025 layoffs in the US by outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas found of the 76,214 tech jobs lost this year, 20,000 were explicitly related to “technological updates.” And of those, only in 75 cases was AI officially cited. “DOGE impact” and economic conditions were the top culprits, according to the agency.
“Being able to communicate things that are happening transformatively inside of an organization is very similar to being able to communicate things that are transpiring in [a] crisis situation,” Maffei told HR Brew.
Execs are beginning to make headlines for speaking to this, and some are doing it better than others.
Duolingo faced backlash in April after announcing plans to focus on becoming an “AI-first” company, phasing out contractors and hiring only if a team cannot automate the work. Maffei called it “one deaf,” telling HR Brew that it sent the message: We will use trendy buzzwords to capture sales at the expense of our workforce. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s June memo to employees delivered a better analysis of what the company anticipates will happen moving forward, but Maffei suggested there was room for more details about the company’s plans and fallout to employees.
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Silence. “I actually think that the lack of communication is almost worse than poorly communicating,” Maffei said. “I think that as soon as you decide that you’re going to sit quiet on a topic that has this much impact across your entire org, it has impact on the way that employees interact with each other. It has impact in the way that the employees interact with the business, and maybe most importantly, it impacts how the business interacts with the employee.”
Without any information from leaders about AI strategy, employees are left to make their own assumptions about what might happen, and “those assumptions are never positive,” Maffei told HR Brew. The silence signals two possibilities to employees, he said: either the company is pursuing AI technology discreetly behind my back or company leaders have no plans at all.
“You’re on a rudderless boat, or you’re fearful the bottom is going to fall off. Neither are good if you’re in the middle of the ocean,” he said.
The memo. Maffei returned to crisis communications, suggesting that leading as a human with honesty, authenticity, and a willingness to communicate through uncertainty is the right internal comms strategy.
“Too often the fear of saying, ‘We don’t know exactly how this is going to play out, but here’s our anticipation, and if it goes left, then we’re thinking this way, and if it goes right, we’re thinking that way, and if it goes into way, and if it goes in another way, we'll figure it out,” he said. “That comes off as authentic. It comes off as real.”
Communications with employees about AI strategy and adoption should be as clear as possible while acknowledging that there are unknown factors yet considered, and share what impacts are known or anticipated, even ones that might impact headcount.
“That’s such a different message than, ‘AI is going to change the future. We’re now AI-first…and by the way, you guys are all on the side of the road when we’re done with this,’” he said.