Emotions are not a side effect of change; they are the currency that makes change possible. When organizations start transformations such as bringing AI into the workplace, the real gap emerges. Today’s modern workplace is still well-grounded in Industrial Revolution ideas and paradigms. Under decades like that, our humanity, creativity, and willingness to even stray outside the confines of a job description is deeply suppressed. There is an emotional reality that is going untended and unacknowledged. People being asked to work in new ways at urgent speeds with little attention given to how they can process these changes which challenge notions of value, identity, power and more.
Change is emotional, AI makes it feel procedural
Research still continues to show that most large-scale transformations fail, and the reasons are far more human than technical. One recent analysis highlights that roughly three-quarters of transformational initiatives miss their goals, while about two-thirds of employees report “change fatigue,” with many saying they either do not understand the change or actively disagree with it. They disagree with it. There’s the humanity! There’s the critical thinking capability you hired for…but how do you connect with it? In other words, change management is not broken because leaders lack frameworks; it is broken because organizations underestimate how deeply emotions, meaning, and identity are entangled with work.
Letting go of an old business model or way of working is not just strategic; it is emotional grief work, requiring leaders to help people release familiar identities and shared histories so they can consider and co-create a different future.
Emotions as the fuel of AI change
Neuroscience research shows that chronic uncertainty and unaddressed negative emotions can impair executive function, narrowing attention and reducing problem-solving capacity. That same emotional circuitry, when met with empathy and clear purpose, becomes a powerful engine for motivation, creativity, and learning. Studies of emotional intelligence in teams find that leaders who recognize, name, and respond to emotions build higher trust, better collaboration, and stronger performance over time.
AI programs amplify this dynamic because they often trigger fear of obsolescence, status loss, or loss of control. In a world where up to 78% of organizations report using AI in at least one business function, employees who experience AI as something done “to” them rather than “with” them predictably withdraw or resist. Bridging the AI aspiration–emotion gap means treating those responses not as obstacles to push through, but as data about unmet needs for clarity, agency, and belonging.
Empathy as a leadership edge in the AI era
Empathy is increasingly emerging as a measurable performance advantage, not just a “soft” trait. A 2023 Harvard Business Review study found that teams led by tech-fluent, empathetic leaders saw engagement rates roughly 40% higher than those led by managers focused only on technology. Other reviews of emotional intelligence and teams show consistent links between emotionally intelligent leadership, stronger coordination, and higher team performance.
AI-focused articles now argue that successful adoption depends less on the sophistication of the tools and more on the psychological environment leaders create. When leaders invest in listening, psychological safety, and emotionally honest dialogue, they accelerate AI adoption because people feel safe enough to experiment, admit mistakes, and surface risks early.
Creativity, curiosity, and “bee-like” change
If emotions are the currency of change, creativity and curiosity are the bees that move that currency through the hive. Americans for the Arts and The Conference Board found that 97% of surveyed employers consider creativity increasingly important, yet many struggle to find enough creative talent. Those same studies highlight skills like problem identification, pattern recognition, curiosity, and comfort with ambiguity as central to innovative performance.
In the AI transition, these “arts” skills become survival skills. Research on creative work shows that empowering leadership and creative-process engagement—activities like problem framing, idea generation, and sense-making—directly boost employee creativity and innovation. When organizations create space for experimentation, improvisation, and cross-pollination of ideas, they mirror how bees “infect” each other with information and collectively adapt the hive.
Making space for the emotional journey
The hardest part is that the practices that make AI change work require practices such as slowing down to name emotions, holding listening circles, and experimenting with new creative rituals. In our Industrial Revolution management-trained brains, these steps often get cast as a luxury in organizations wired for speed and outcomes. Yet the data suggest the opposite: psychological safety, empathy, and participatory design are precisely what differentiate the minority of transformations that succeed from the majority that quietly stall.
Leaning into emotions means treating them like “clouds around the mountain.” They aren’t distractions from the summit, but instead the weather system that determines whether anyone actually makes the climb. That journey starts with acknowledgment and simply making space and time—to ask what people are feeling, to honor what they are afraid of losing, and to invite them to co-create what comes next. Most organizations will dismiss this as soft; a few will recognize it as the only way their aspirations will ever become lived reality.
Image by Vengadesh Sago