Your employees may be grieving their old jobs. HR leaders should listen first.
Kristin Supancich, Chief People Officer at Ahead, sat down with an engineer who had spent three decades working with network infrastructure. He wasn't angry about AI adoption. He wasn't afraid of losing his job. He was grieving.
"I've been an engineer for 30 years," he told her. "I love tinkering. I love being in it. I like to watch how it's happening. And I don't trust it yet. And I miss the tinkering."
His role remained. The work was still meaningful. But an AI agent now handled the tinkering while he read the output. The part of his job that had given him pleasure and identity for decades was gone.
That conversation reshaped how Supancich thinks about resistance to AI in the workplace. What if the hesitation HR leaders encounter isn't really about fear of replacement, but about loss?
The grief underneath the resistance
Supancich had recently read work by a psychologist exploring this exact dynamic. The insight was straightforward: people are leaving behind what they knew for a long time and what they found joy in. They may be excited about the future, but the anxiety isn't about job loss. It's about grieving something they genuinely enjoyed.
At Ahead, an enterprise cloud solution and IT services provider, engineers and salespeople have largely embraced AI tools. But in parts of the business built around process-driven, repetitive tasks, the response has been different-more hesitant, more resistant.
Supancich's hypothesis: people who have done the same job for years often find satisfaction in the step-by-step process itself. Removing that work forces them to reimagine their role entirely. "The thought of reimagining: 'what would I do if I didn't do this stuff?' We probably have some work there on the human side," she said.
Listening before pushing harder
Her approach to that work isn't to mandate training or push adoption harder. It's to listen.
Supancich has been encouraging Ahead's senior leaders to resist the instinct to reassure employees and instead create real space for people to voice what's worrying them. "If someone's not embracing it, instead of using the stick, it's like, let's talk about what's making you nervous," she said. "Let me give you the realities of what's really going to happen versus the fear of the unknown."
She acknowledges that fear of job loss is real and shouldn't be brushed aside. Employees read the headlines. But the grief framing opens a more honest conversation about what people are actually experiencing.
Ahead's most recent engagement survey suggests the listening-first approach is working. Four AI-specific questions covering leader support, daily usage, and confidence with tools all scored in the 80th percentile. "I was actually really excited and quite amazed at how high it was," Supancich said.
When your own job is changing
Supancich's perspective carries weight because she's willing to turn the lens on herself. When she first read the psychologist's work on grief, it didn't just clarify what she was seeing in her employees. It clarified something in her own experience.
One of her acknowledged strengths is her ability to connect with employees, read a room, look someone in the eye. As AI absorbs more operational work and the workforce potentially shifts toward a blend of human and digital employees, she wonders what becomes of that skill.
"If my employees in the future are not human and I have less of them and work is going so fast that this is a waste of time, I'm not going to like that as much," she said. "I enjoy this. So, I do think there's a sense of grief that I feel."
She's noticed smaller losses too. As AI rewrites workplace emails into clean, bulleted language, individual voices are disappearing. "I know the way that so-and-so writes to me, and at the end he makes a funny joke and there's an emoji, and that kind of lightens my day," she said. "I don't want companies to become just monotone speak."
During the COVID pandemic, Supancich fielded questions about disease protocols and physical distancing-territory far outside her HR background. Now navigating AI infrastructure feels like another version of the same thing: a role quietly expanding into places she never trained for. She's had to learn to sit with that discomfort rather than push past it.
How to lead people through loss
Supancich's advice starts with acknowledgment. Sit with what people are losing before trying to move them forward.
"We not only lead in the transformation, but we're going to have to hear these things and then help people make the transition from grief to back to excitement again, just like all the stages of change," she said.
The reframe isn't about minimizing what's being lost. It's about helping people find meaning in what their work is becoming and trusting that excitement will follow once the grief has been heard.
Change has always involved loss. But the losses this time are quieter and more personal-tied not to jobs disappearing but to the parts of work that gave people identity and joy. Naming that honestly is what makes the transition possible. It's also, perhaps, where the real work of AI for Human Resources leadership begins.
For HR professionals supporting AI adoption, understanding this distinction may be the difference between resistance that hardens and transitions that stick. The engineer who missed tinkering didn't need reassurance about job security. He needed someone to acknowledge what he was losing.
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