How giant leaders try to ease employee anxiety about AI

As artificial intelligence reshapes the way people work, some business leaders are focusing less on replacing employees — and more on helping them adapt to the technology.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the US, has emerged as one of the most vocal executives in urging caution about the impact of AI on jobs. Dimon expects to employ fewer workers over the next five years, but warned that accelerating AI-driven layoffs without safeguards could backfire, potentially triggering “civil unrest,” he said recently while speaking at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, according to Fortune.

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Dimon stated that he would even accept government bans on replacing large numbers of workers with AI, if this were necessary to “save society”.

He also insisted that companies need to plan for the human consequences of automation. “I have a plan to reskill people, relocate people, provide income support to people,” Dimon said of the more than 300,000 employees on his payroll.

As for the AI ​​boom about to take hold in enterprises, there is a significant need for computing power to support it all.

Building a future where AI elevates human talent

Dimon is not alone in advocating AI strategies that put people at the center.

Also in Davos, Microsoft President Brad Smith addressed what he described as a defining question for leaders during a Harvard Business Review executive panel: “Can technology be a platform that enables people to improve?”

He framed the future of work as a race between humans and machines. “If we’re just going to say today, ‘The best we are today is the best we’ll ever be,’ then computers will surpass us,” he said.

Smith argued that the outcome changes if each advance in AI is used to enhance human capabilities, rather than replace them.

If workers can use smarter machines to become better at their jobs, he suggested, then in many areas “machines will never catch up to us.”

“Aren’t we, as employers and leaders, going to use technology as tools to help our employees become better in and of themselves?” he asked.

These questions become more urgent as AI moves from experimentation to everyday use.

This year, AI is moving from piloting and testing to enterprise-wide scalability as worker access to AI tools expands, according to Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 report.

The companies surveyed expanded workers’ access to AI by around 50% in just one year. While only about a quarter of respondents said their organizations have taken 40% or more of their AI experiments to production so far, more than half expect to reach that plateau in the next three to six months.

Still, the report also highlights a gap that directly connects to the concerns raised at Davos.

Lack of worker skills is cited as the biggest barrier to integrating AI into business, even as less than half of companies are making significant changes to their employee strategies.

For leaders like Dimon and Smith, the message is clear: The true test of AI leadership may have less to do with how quickly companies adopt new tools and more to do with how effectively they help their people keep up with this transformation.