The big change is here. Four experts on how to prepare for it.
I asked four people who guide change for a living what to actually do. Not one of them started with AI.
A friend who runs a company told me last week that he let go of his whole middle layer.
Eight managers, gone. The senior people work harder now, the company is more profitable than it has ever been, and he said it quietly, the way you say something you are still deciding how to feel about.
A few days earlier, the CEO of a company I genuinely admire told me his number. Four hundred people today. In a year, he wants a hundred. The top talent, the experts, the ones who can do the work of five because they know how to build with agents and manage them. He was not being cruel, just being honest.
You can read a version of these stories every week now: a company cuts forty percent, another freezes hiring, and the feed is ninety percent other people’s agents doing things you have not figured out yet. Underneath all of it, a low hum nobody says out loud at work.
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I have a strange seat for watching this.
I have taught more than a thousand people to work with agents, and I run private workshops inside companies, so I hear what the CEOs ask behind closed doors and I watch the faces in the room.
The faces are split. In some I see fear, the real kind. In others something lit up, the ones who already figured out they just got superpowers. Sometimes both, in the same person, in the same hour.
The freelancers I teach are mostly flying. Someone who worked alone now runs a small team of agents, and they tell their colleagues what they built. The employees are quieter. Many have written to tell me they keep it secret. Secret from colleagues, because there is a quiet competition now. Secret from their manager, because if the boss knew the AI did most of it, then what. They are afraid that using it well makes them look less necessary, not more.
So I did the thing I do when something matters and I am out of my depth. I asked people who are not.
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I am not a psychologist.
But I grew up inside it. My father, my mother, my wife, all of them in psychology and therapy, and if I had not gone into design I would probably have ended up there too. I host a podcast about behavioral change called MindDesign, and before any of the agent work I taught workshops on how to design change in people. So when the whole world started panicking about a tool, the part that pulled me was not the tool. It was the change. How a person actually lets go of the old way and picks up a new one. That is the real subject here, and it is the one I love.
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So I wrote three simple questions and sent them to four people who guide change for a living.
Alon and Elad, two organizational psychologists. Tony, who ran engineering teams for years and now mentors executives. And Ifat, who has spent twenty-two years inside companies during exactly this kind of change.
The questions were dead simple:
What would you say to the employee, the manager, and the person at the top?
Not one of them led with AI.
Four people, four different fields, no notes compared. Every answer started somewhere older and more human, and when I lined them up, the same three questions kept surfacing, one for each person in that frightened room.
1. If you are the employee: what do you love to do?
Alon started with breathing. “This isn’t really about the technology,” he wrote. “It’s about the human being behind it.” Then the question that stayed with me. If AI takes part of your work, what does your day look like now, what do you hand over, and what stays yours.
Elad pushed from a different side. Move, do not freeze, because standing still is the worst move you can make. But do not chase every new model either, since that road is mostly noise and exhaustion. Start from how you actually work today: what drains you, where you go in circles, what you are quietly good at.
Ifat named the fear out loud, the exact one I keep hearing: that you will teach the AI, and then nobody will need you. Her answer was not a pep talk. Learn the tools, and at the same time build the inner muscles, curiosity and flexibility and the nerve to keep moving while it is still unclear where any of this goes.
None of that is “pick a tool.” It is “find what is yours.”
Tony put the edge on it. If you are waiting for stability, that world is already over, so ask what you are good at and what you love. We were raised to fix our weaknesses. She believes in the opposite, and so do I.
2. If you are the manager: what can you still create?
Tony was sharpest here, and it stung a little. “Stop living in back-to-back meetings,” she said, “because if you are in meetings all day you are not making anything.”
We were trained to feel important running down the hall with a laptop, and at the end of it we built nothing. Every manager now, from the most junior to the CEO, has to become a builder again. What is the new thing you made in the world this month.
Elad sees this moment as a rare employee-development opportunity for managers. Since they own team’s work routines, they can choose to dedicate time and create a practical “AI lab” during the day-to-day.
His tip: ask team members to rebuild outdated tasks with AI, give them space to show what they tried, and create momentum through personal example. The strongest signal is not sending links, but showing small everyday uses. The window for employees to have an active role in changing how they work is open now - and it will not stay open forever.
~
Alon would have you hold two layers at once:
First, what your team is even for in the next chapter of this company. Only then, how AI supports that.
Second, the human layer: what is happening to your people inside the change, and what they need so they stop being afraid.
Ifat calls this becoming a coach of the capacity to change, which is a harder job than managing tasks, and a more durable one.
3. If you are the one deciding: what do you believe in?
Alon sees leaders making too many decisions fast, out of pressure, without much sense of why. His advice was almost gentle:
“Take a breath, come back to yourself, ask what actually drives your decisions and where you want to take this thing. From there you can ask how AI serves that direction instead of replacing it.”
Ifat gave the cleanest test: are you implementing a tool, or managing a transformation?
They are two different jobs and they need different attention. And the question that should hang on every leadership wall this year: are you acting out of choice, or out of FOMO.
Tony works with C-level people in exactly this storm, and her answer surprised me most: “back to basics”, she said, so they do not have heart attacks. Water, sun, a walk. Get grounded, because the ground moves under them every morning, and only from a steady place can you ask the real one. Where am I leading this, and what do I believe in.
The part nobody mentions
There is a cost to the new way, and Tony said it plainly. When the only thing you consult is the machine, it tells you what you want to hear. It does not know the friction, the politics, the people. So instead of calling a colleague who lives your reality, you ask the model, and you end up more alone than before. I have felt this one in the last few months. It is the quiet tax on all of this, and almost nobody posts about it.
So hold the fear honestly. The layoffs are real. And then look at what came back from four people who have watched humans move through hard change for a living. Every one of them turned away from the tool and toward the person. They were all answering the same question in their own words: how do you embrace a change this big without losing yourself.
The one thing to do this week
Whatever hat you are wearing today, the question is already written for you.
Employee: what do you love to do?
Manager: what can you still make with your own hands?
Deciding: what do you actually believe in?
Then do the small thing I give everyone, the same move I teach on day one before anyone touches a tool. Put the screen down.
Take a pen and a real piece of paper.
Write who you would hire if your budget were infinite. Then write what you actually do all day, where it is fun, where it is not, and what you would hand to them.
No tools yet. Just you and the page. The fear drops because suddenly there is something in your hands. And that page is also the first real step to working with agents, because the people who prepare best for this are the ones who learn to lead a team they cannot see.
Tony has seen a lot of cycles, and she is not worried about the ending:
“I’m a fundamentally optimistic person, I don’t believe high-tech is about to end.”
Terrifying and a little thrilling, both at once, which is the only way I know how to hold it.
I do not know what this year looks like, and I do not think anyone does. That is the scary part. It is also, if you let it be, the open part.
In a few minutes I am going to close this laptop and go pick up my son.
That is the whole point. The agents, the systems, the clarity, all of it is so I get to do that. The big change is not really about the machines. It never was.
Big thanks to:
Tony Arad Felik
Founder @ From Manager To Leader | Tech Executive Mentor
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonyaradfelik/
Ifat Gross Ariav
Strategic Advisor for Executive Growth
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ifat-grossariav/
Alon Alperovitz
Organisational Psychologist & Change Facilitator
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alon-alperovitz-5200a187/
Elad Roth
Organisational Psychologist & AI Change Consultant
https://www.linkedin.com/in/elad-roth-b6691774/
That’s it for this week.
If this helped, forward it to someone (a real human) trying to keep their head above water right now.
See you next week ✌️
-- Tom
(the guy who asked four experts about AI and got four answers about being human)
P.S. This newsletter was 70% made by my agents. The other 30% was four people who actually know what they are talking about, and me.
P.P.S. Have you read about the Employees of the future?
P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me :)