The ghost in the org chart
Key points:
- • AI may eliminate entry-level roles where young professionals traditionally develop workplace skills.
- • Human communication, trust, and judgment become more valuable as automation handles technical work.
- • Leaders must intentionally protect career pathways and teach soft skills through real-world practice.
Forget the costumes. The scariest thing in business this Halloween isn’t a skeleton in the doorway. It’s a ghost in the org chart: the job quietly vanishing while nobody in the room dares to say it out loud.
Uncomfortable truth: Most CEOs have an opinion about AI and jobs. Far fewer will share it in the light.
So I went looking for what leaders actually say. I found three camps: the trick, the treat, and the ones who don’t believe in ghosts. I sit somewhere in the middle, and I’ll tell you exactly where.
Join us at caa’s upcoming leadership summits! These premier events bring together hundreds of public and private sector leaders to discuss the challenges and opportunities for businesses and investors. Find the next summit in a city near you!
Camp 1: The Cutters (the trick)
Mercer’s 2026 Global Talent Trends survey of 825 C-suite leaders found that 99% expect AI to reduce headcount to some degree within two years. Oliver Wyman, as reported by Moneywise, found the share of CEOs seeking to cut junior roles jumped from 17% to 43% in a year.
I think they’re right about the direction. Whole categories of work will disappear, and not quietly. But look at who gets haunted first: the entry-level jobs. The exact place where young people learn how to work.
Camp 2: The Optimists (the treat)
KPMG surveyed 400 U.S. CEOs this fall. 89% expect to grow headcount over the next three years, and 86% are redesigning roles around human-AI collaboration. KPMG U.S. CEO Tim Walsh calls the path to AI-driven job growth “directionally very clear.”
Now read the fine print. In that same survey, 53% still plan workforce reductions in some areas. Candy and cobwebs, on the same spreadsheet.
I believe new jobs will come. I just don’t believe they’ll arrive as fast as the old ones disappear. That’s my read, not a statistic. And the new jobs won’t be “operate the machine.” They’ll be “do what the machine can’t.”
Camp 3: The Skeptics (the ones who don’t believe in ghosts)
Wharton’s Peter Cappelli says companies expect AI to take jobs, but “it hasn’t happened yet.” Brookings’ Molly Kinder calls announcing AI-driven cuts an “investor-friendly message.” Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, said of AI’s link to output: “That link is not there yet.” Forrester says many companies announcing AI layoffs lack mature AI to replace those workers.
Fair. Some of it is AI-washing, a ghost story told to make the numbers look scarier or smarter. But whether the reason is real or convenient, the person who got the email is just as gone.
The skill nobody is teaching
Here’s where all three camps collide, and it’s the part that keeps me up at night: soft skills.
Reading a room. Having the hard conversation. Eye contact. Negotiation. Listening without reaching for your phone. When AI handles the analysis, the first draft, and the first pass, what’s left is what humans do to and for each other: persuade, comfort, challenge, build trust. You can’t automate a handshake.
And we are not practicing it. I saw it up close, in an annual review. A member of my team admitted they were scared to be on the phone. Not because they weren’t capable. Because they’d never had any practice before they came to work with us.
Think about what that means. caa is built on personal touch and personal outreach. For us, the phone isn’t old technology. It’s the tool. And a smart, willing young professional was haunted by the sound of it ringing.
That review stayed with me. It sent me back to “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, which shook me as a mother, as a person, and as an employer.
Haidt argues that between roughly 2010 and 2015, childhood went through what he calls a great rewiring. Kids stopped spending their days playing together in the real world and started spending them inside a phone. He points to a handful of costs: less real-world play and social time, less sleep, fragmented attention, and addictive design built to keep them scrolling.
Read that list as an employer and it stops being abstract. Fragmented attention is the person who can’t sit through a hard conversation. Lost social time is the person who never practiced reading a face. Take away the awkward, sweaty-palmed reps of childhood, like calling a friend’s house, ordering your own food, and talking to an adult, and you get a young adult who is brilliant on a screen and terrified of a ringing phone.
As a mother, the book made me look at how much of a childhood I’m protecting. As a person, it made me look at my own relationship with the screen in my hand. As an employer, it made me stop assuming. I used to assume that every new hire arrived knowing how to talk to people. Now I know I have to teach it, on purpose, the way we teach everything else.
I’m not blaming this generation. We handed them the phones. We built the apps that keep them hooked. They didn’t choose the haunted house. They were born inside it.
And here is the cruel timing: just as AI takes over the work that happens on a screen, the work that remains is the work that happens between people. The skill we most need is the one we stopped practicing.
Soft skills grow in rooms. That’s why I keep convening people in person.
After the ghosts leave town
Halloween ends. The decorations come down. The org chart is still there in the morning. Here’s what I’d do once the ghosts leave town:
- Flip on the porch light. Level with your people about AI. Say out loud what will change. Silence is the ghost. (Axios CEO Jim VandeHei’s advice to CEOs: speak plainly about AI.)
- Hand out the good candy. Protect the first rung of the ladder. If AI eats entry-level work, rebuild the reps another way: shadowing, client time, real responsibility.
- Take the mask off. Teach soft skills on purpose. Phones down in meetings. Practice the hard conversation. Let people make a bad call on the phone and survive it. Don’t assume anyone learned it.
- Hire for the human. Interview for listening, not just answers.
The jobs that vanish won’t scare me most. A generation that never learned to pick up the phone will.
The ghost in the org chart isn’t AI. It’s the silence about it.
Want more? Read the CEO insights.
