Is AI enabling low-empathy corporate leadership?
Modern corporate culture penalised openly anti-social leadership behaviour. What's changing now is the pressure to hide it
Corporate life feels a lot colder right now than it did a few years ago. If you spend enough time listening to earnings call or leadership messaging, you’ll start noticing the same patterns appearing over and over again.
People are discussed in increasingly mechanical terms, often during a period where many workers already feel exhausted, financially stressed and emotionally detached from their jobs. Many are experiencing burnout.
While I don’t think the rise of AI in the corporate workplace has created this dynamic, I do think it’s been a heavy contributing factor. As many organisations build confidence in their ability to automate certain roles (although how successful that will be in the longer term remains to be seen), they’ve also inadvertently created an environment where certain leaders feel more empowered to act a little differently than they might have done five years ago.
There’s a much-discussed study from 2016 that found around one in five corporate executives display elevated psychopathic traits. Whenever this statistic gets discussed online, people immediately jump to images of serial killers and violent criminals, which is part of the reason I don’t really love the sensationalist framing.
However, that’s not really what researchers are talking about in corporate settings. In a clinical sense, a diagnosed psychopath is someone who displays traits like low empathy, emotional detachment, manipulativeness, superficial charm and a highly transactional view of other people.
Still not ideal personality traits, but it also doesn’t automatically mean someone is an imminent danger to society if they’ve learned to mask and behave in a socially acceptable manner.
The performance of empathy
For a long time, corporate culture created fairly strong social pressure around how leaders were expected to behave publicly as companies competed for the best talent. Executives learned the language of empathy, culture, wellbeing, psychological safety and diversity because those were the norms of the environment.
You got ahead partly by speaking that language fluently. Some leaders genuinely embraced those ideas, while others learned how to perform them convincingly because it was professionally advantageous to do so.
What I think we’re witnessing right now is some of those social pressures to perform getting weaker in real time.
The return of ruthless efficiency
We’re in an economic environment shaped by cost pressure, AI disruption, layoffs and investor anxiety. Efficiency has become fashionable again, and so has the language that comes with it.
You can hear it in the way some leaders now talk about people.
“Lower-value human capital.”
“Headcount reduction.”
“Replacing inefficiencies.”
It’s a giant red flag to hear a person talking about other people as if they’re an operational burden, rather than human beings. That sort of anti-social behaviour should be frowned at.
I’ll be the first to admit that businesses absolutely need to make hard decisions sometimes. Companies are not charities - efficiency and profitability matter. Technology changes industries. None of that is controversial to me.
What feels different right now is the level of emotional detachment we’re seeing from some executive leaders. You might have heard about Standard Chartered’s CEO Bill Winters, who recently said this on the subject of the bank’s AI strategy:
”It’s not cost cutting: it’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital.”
This is the sort of language that reveals how some leaders understand the people inside their organisations. Not as workers with lives, families, obligations and financial realities, but as units of value in the broader system.
At the same time, some organisations have started framing ordinary human needs as inefficiencies to be engineered out of systems - people needing flexibility, or asking questions about the future. Or people who are burning out and want more stability and balance in their lives.
Increasingly, these things are discussed as friction points rather than normal conditions of human life.
That is not normal. It should not become acceptable in a civilised society.
Corporations don’t exist outside society
Right now, it’s critical to remember that corporations do not exist outside society. Businesses rely on social trust, public infrastructure, educated workforces and functioning communities. They depend on people feeling invested in the system itself.
This is the social contract between corporations and society. If one side wants to change the terms, there needs to be a process of renegotiation and rebalancing. That hasn’t happened yet.
Instead, workers are being asked to absorb the consequences of technological change that has never been renegotiated and agreed, while corporations describe those consequences as efficiency gains.
To put it in commercial terms, if this becomes normal in the social contract, it becomes precedent. If people accept the idea that human needs are just inefficiencies, then that becomes the accepted operating logic. If we wait to long to renegotiate, we lose our standing.
Human beings aren’t operational inefficiencies
For years, companies understood there were reputational and cultural consequences attached to openly treating workers as expendable inputs. Now some executives appear to believe the market will reward ruthless optimisation more than relational leadership.
Maybe in the short term it will, but over the longer term, organisations still need legitimacy and trust. They still need people willing to contribute more than the bare minimum.
And contrary to what some corners of corporate culture seem to believe right now, humans are supposed to have emotions. We’re supposed to need rest, and we’re supposed to ask difficult questions. That’s the very nature of humanity, and it’s also the foundation of creativity, innovation, collaboration and social stability in the first place.
Right now I feel that companies that lose sight of that may eventually discover that highly optimised systems can also become extremely fragile ones.