AI memos from tech CEOs are lacking compassion 📝
Good leadership is needed now more than ever. CEOs are dropping the ball.
Tech CEOs’ recent AI memos to staff have come under scrutiny in the last weeks. In some cases, that has gone as far as calls for boycotts. Plenty has already been said about these companies’ strategies of embracing AI in the workplace, so what I want to focus on is tone.
I strongly believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, BUT the choice of tone for these letters feels so out of touch with the concerns many people have about AI and their jobs.
One month ago, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke shared screenshots of his internal email in an undiplomatic post on X that accused his staff of leaking the memo.
The memo illustrates a sink-or-swim workplace through its inclusion of phrases like “if you’re not climbing, you’re sliding” and “you have to keep running, just to stay still”, before commenting that even that doesn’t “sound terribly ambitious to me anymore.” Employees have much less autonomy than CEOs. These phrases put a ton of pressure on people who have much less margin for control. What’s worse: they likely already have a lot of anxiety about being replaced by AI.
One might argue that this memo should work like a wake-up call, but one can do that in far more compassionate ways. Triggering people’s stress response is counter-productive. Read the room. You’re sending this to people just weeks after Salesforce announced it will be laying off 1,000 people, Meta announced cutting 5% of its staff, with many other companies doing similar cuts among tech staff.
A good example of better wording is a similar memo shared with Duolingo staff, though it, too, introduced unnecessary uncertainty, which I’ll discuss further down.
Radical candor
In a post on X by Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman, he shares his own AI memo, which starts by saying he despises people who sugar-coat reality. Instead of posting it and owning it, Kaufman, too, chooses to preemptively accuse staff of leaking it and acts like his hand is forced by adding the words: “Before it gets out somewhere else.”
Despite some of the practical advice being valuable, it’s filled with lots of stressors, which may actually prevent people from being able to take in the important parts.
After saying he despises people who opt for different social strategies, the Fiverr CEO goes on to declare that “AI is coming for your jobs” and even “AI is coming for you”. He continues:
“If you do not become an exceptional talent at what you do, a master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months. I am not trying to scare you. I am not talking about your job at Fiverr. I am talking about your ability to stay in your profession in the industry.”
Since we’re not sugar-coating, I can offer some “radical candor” of my own: it sounds exactly like you are trying to scare your staff straight. You even say this email is intended as a wake-up call. So, including that line feels disingenuous and undermines any attempt to offer job security. That promise feels hollow, as it’s immediately followed by saying people won’t even be able to stay in the industry. The conditional “If you do not” at the start of the paragraph sets this whole part up to read like a threat.
“Are we all doomed? Not all of us, but those who will not wake up and understand the new reality are, unfortunately, doomed.”
There are better ways to phrase this. I’ve even taken the advice to employ AI and asked Claude for help, which suggests something more along these lines: “Those who recognize this shift and adapt will find new opportunities, while those who resist change may face challenges ahead. Our success depends on our willingness to evolve—and I'm committed to helping our team navigate this transformation together.”
Empathy
Musk recently called empathy a “fundamental weakness of western civilization.” It’s an understandable viewpoint for him to espouse, as it will be easier for King Ketamine to increase his power when people with strong moral principles get sidelined in a game of divide and conquer. We already live in trying times in which a lot of people are anxious about today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. Let’s practice compassion towards each other and stave off further disempowerment and a global burnout.
Artificial intelligence’s emergence is an important development to consider, and one thing the aforementioned CEOs are right about is that it should be proactively explored. So, how do you put that to your employees?
Lead with compassion. Understand your staff’s anxieties, and that stress works differently for people lower on the ladder.
Offer security amid uncertainty. Acknowledge uncertainty without fueling fear, and follow that up by offering clarity where you can.
Use inclusive language. The above letters read a bit like every-person-for-themselves. Shift the tone away from individualism and more towards “we’re in this together.” Don’t make it disingenuous. Your employees will be able to tell and if you can’t follow it up and betray their trust, you’ll have a hard time regaining it.
Back words up with action. It’s not enough to say, “I’ll clear my calendar” or “go learn from a top performer.” If there ever was a time to show leadership, it’s now. Lay out clear ways in which you are going to support the organisation.
Emphasise shared values that have broad buy-in. A lot of organisations set their values top-down. The risk with that is that these values may come across more as corporate expectations rather than moral drivers that people subscribe to. Focus on the values that clearly have a lot of buy-in.
But in the most simple terms: just put yourself in the shoes of the recipient. Don’t write what you yourself would need to hear. Most people are not going to be like you. And if you piss off the ones that are like you, then you risk them getting disgruntled, quitting, and starting a competitor that, who knows, leverages AI better than you.
Out of all the letters I’ve seen, I think Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, almost got it right. I say almost, because his letter still creates unnecessary ambiguity for contractors (“we’ll gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle”). They took the step to post it to their company’s LinkedIn account, rather than the type of “leaking employees are forcing my hand” type posts by Fiverr’s and Shopify’s CEOs, which is commendable.
Then there’s one last thing…
I have been outspoken about the selective outrage concerning AI’s environmental impact. And as much as I would encourage individuals to be curious about these tools, I would also implore companies to be very clear about what this means for their sustainability targets. Unfortunately, none of the letters acknowledge that topic, while it’s exactly these CEOs that can have an outsized impact by communicating clear policy here. A commitment to a world we, and future generations, can live in is a value shared by everyone, surely.
(- ‿- ) For your ears
Ambient & techno producer Endless Ritual dropped a rhythmically stunning 3-track release called Tension of Opposites on Mumbai-based label Sonic Perception. Hypnotic and energising.
(◕‿◕✿) For your eyes
I’ve recently come across the work of Yui Sakamoto, who unfortunately passed away in 2024. His work fuses Mexican mysticism with techniques and inspirations from his native Japan.
Thanks so much for this Bas; super useful as a "how not to do it" guide. Feeling that techno EP too - that's right up my street!