Publisher: Fortune
That headline is a clown show. “Leaders love AI. Employees aren’t sold. This is HR’s biggest challenge—and opportunity.” Biggest based on what, your feelings. There’s zero evidence AI adoption outranks pay, retention, compliance, or anything real. It’s bait for HR FOMO, nothing more.
The conflict of interest is loud enough to drown out the copy. A BambooHR CEO pushing a BambooHR survey to argue BambooHR’s preferred answer. No methodology, no sample, no wording, no raw data. Just tidy percentages and vibes. “77% encourage AI” and “17% of ICs are enthusiastic” tell you nothing without who, where, and how. Confidence isn’t competence, and self‑report is spin friendly by design.
Then comes the sermon about a “trust gap.” Of course he calls it that. Admitting the obvious would hurt. A lot of executives are panicked about losing status to algorithms, and they’re projecting. Blaming workers for not “embracing change” while dodging job security and incentives is manipulative. It’s PR theater for middle managers, syrupy and empty.
The strategy content is warmed‑over slideware. An AI Fit Test that any intern could sketch, followed by three councils with capitalized names and no decision rights, no KPIs, no escalation path, no data ownership plan. That’s conference fluff, not an operating model.
Risk is treated like a footnote. Nothing serious on data governance, privacy, IP, vendor SLAs, model drift, auditability in regulated roles, or how HR would even touch any of that without Legal, IT, and Security doing the heavy lifting. Hand‑waving “responsible AI” while pushing rapid rollout isn’t trust building. It’s reckless.
Even the packaging advertises the emptiness. The hero image looks like it lost a fistfight with Photoshop and a desk lamp. Fortune’s standards seem to be on sabbatical. The voice is smug and tone‑deaf, the HR‑as‑savior posture is laughable, and yes, the LinkedIn headshot radiates outsourced empathy.
Bottom line is simple. This is a vendor op‑ed pretending to be wisdom. Thin data, casual causality, Hallmark‑card governance. It will not survive first contact with a real integration project. Read it as marketing, then put it in the shredder.
