The Vision Deficit: Leadership and the Loss of Humanity in the Age of AI

What began as a triumph of scale, with AI replacing 700 human agents, ended in something far more ancient: the rediscovery of need. The need for presence. For trust. For a human voice that does not run on tokens. Klarna’s reversal was not just a business decision — it was an existential confession. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted, almost with reverence, that “cost became too predominant.” In this quiet retraction lies a parable not about technology, but about a failure. Failure to understand that companies are not systems — they are societies. To understand that scale without soul collapses into noise.

Not long ago, CEOs spoke about talent as their most vital asset. Now there’s a new mantra floating through the halls of corporate leadership: “Everybody’s replaceable”. Employees are being asked to “step it up” or step aside. Shopify won’t hire anyone unless it’s proven that AI can’t do the job first. At Uber, questioning new policies like delayed sabbaticals earns you a warning, not a dialogue.

And perhaps most striking of all, Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested on the Dwarkesh Podcast that AI might fill in the gaps left by missing human relationships. “The average person has three friends,” he said, “but demand for fifteen.” AI, he believes, could help close that gap.

This isn’t just strategy. It’s not even just arrogance.

It’s detachment.

CEOs are no longer steering culture. They’re surrendering to code. They are letting the logic of technology override the logic of humanity.

The Age of AI, the End of Attention

The modern CEO is becoming more of a saboteur of culture, rather than the the steward of it. When Mark Zuckerberg suggests AI could fill the role of friendship, he is not merely proposing a feature — he is drafting a philosophy. One in which human intimacy becomes a bandwidth problem, solvable with better latency. But to believe that a synthetic companion can substitute for presence is to mistake language for meaning. It is to ignore that trust is not a service, but a state of being. AI can replicate tone. It cannot bear witness. No company illustrates this better than Klarna.

What Klarna discovered operationally, others are still ignoring ideologically. Meta. Fiverr. Uber. Leaders are enamored with AI’s speed, scale, and polish. It’s always polite. It never pushes back. It doesn’t take sick days or ask for more than three days of remote work.

But as psychologist Omri Gillath reminds us, AI relationships are “fake” and “empty.” They may seem convenient, but they rob us of what makes interaction meaningful: vulnerability, reciprocity, friction, growth. 

Klarna is now backpedaling — piloting a human-centric service model, inviting users to become on-demand support agents. Not because it’s nostalgic, but because it’s necessary. When brand experience becomes a bot script, trust collapses. And so does valuation — from $45.6 billion to $6.7 billion before partial recovery.

It turns out: you cannot automate your way into loyalty.

Efficiency is Not the Telos

Across boardrooms, leadership has lost its teleology — its sense of ultimate purpose. We do not build for humans anymore; we optimize around them. Or worse, we build for bots.Efficiency, long the servant of vision, has become its master. Uber tells employees to accept new mandates “as a risk we decided to take.” Shopify demands proof that humans are better than models before hiring. Even language, once poetic and connective, has become transactional. The soul of the company has become an interface. In the name of innovation, we are in fact “erasing memory” — the memory of what it meant to build trust, to make meaning, to stand for something.

AI provides the illusion of a tidy, compliant world — a world where staff don’t complain about sabbaticals, customers don’t demand empathy, and investors don’t mind that brand loyalty is being reduced to uptime and latency metrics.

But the cost of this control is profound: employee cynicism, customer attrition, and the slow death of brand authenticity. This isn’t theory — it’s happening. Ask Klarna. Ask the workers being asked to do three jobs in one. Ask the users fleeing algorithm-optimized platforms for slower, stranger, more human experiences .

The Forgotten Leadership Virtue: Discernment

What Klarna now reveals is a deeper virtue most CEOs have not been taught to value: discernment. Discernment asks not “what can be done?” but “what should be done?”. It invites reflection. It acknowledges limits. It restores judgement to its rightful place above automation. The Act II of AI will shift from performance to orchestration. From spectacle to service. From data outputs to human outcomes. But discernment cannot be scaled. It must be practiced. And herein lies the challenge.

Humane by Design

The companies that thrive from here on won’t be the ones who double down on AI-first ideology. They’ll be the ones who treat AI as a tool, not a replacement. Who see technology as augmentation, not abdication. Hiring humans not just for scale, but for soul, designing for presence, not just efficiency and  investing in culture, not just conversion.

They will understand that brand is not a vibe. It’s a contract between people — inside and outside the company — and that contract demands trust, attention, and leadership.

What began as a boast at Klarna ends as a mirror held to us all.We have tools that can predict anything — and yet we understand so little.We have systems that know our preferences — but forget our worth.And so we return, as all good journeys do, to something ancient: “That leadership is not about what you build, but what you protect. ”Not about intelligence, artificial or otherwise — but about wisdom. Not about replacing humans — but remembering them. In the end, conviction is still analogue. And leadership, remains unmistakably human.