NOBODY'S TALKING ABOUT THE GRIEF

📊 Stat of the Issue

64%

The share of workers who say they plan to stay with their current employer not because they are thriving, but because they are scared. (ManpowerGroup Global Talent Barometer 2026) Researchers have started calling it "job hugging." That is not retention. That is fear with a good attendance record.

Earlier this month, Tia Katz, founder and CEO of Hu-X, published a piece in Forbes that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

She mapped what the biggest names in AI -- Altman, Amodei, Suleyman, Musk, McKinsey, the IMF, the WEF -- are saying about the timeline for workforce disruption. The post reached nearly 100,000 people in 24 hours. Some responses were grateful. Others pushed back hard. And one came at her directly: "When did fetishizing the destruction of human livelihoods become an accepted strategy for engagement?"

Katz noticed something in those responses. The dismissal, the deflection, the urgency to debunk. She recognized it as the first stage of grief playing out in a comment section. The conversation she expected to have was about AI timelines. The conversation people needed to have was about identity and the stories they had built their lives around.

That same conversation is happening inside every insurance carrier, agency, and MGA right now. It is just happening quietly. In the break room. In the silence after a team meeting where nobody asked the question everyone was thinking.

We need to talk about it out loud.

The frameworks keep changing because the change keeps accelerating

For decades, business leaders have reached for frameworks to make sense of disruption. You have probably seen most of them. (Katz traces this progression in her recent work.)

VUCA

Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous

Born at the US Army War College in the 1980s, adopted widely after 9/11. Assumed you were still on solid ground and able to act.

BANI

Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible

Coined by futurist Jamais Cascio in 2020 as COVID hit. Acknowledged the chaos had become internal. Systems we thought were resilient weren't.

RUPT

Rapid, Unpredictable, Paradoxical, Tangled

Developed by the Center for Creative Leadership. Focuses on the blinding speed of change and the tangled nature of interconnected problems.

TUNA

Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel, Ambiguous

Preferred by some for its emphasis on novelty. What we face now has no real precedent. No playbook from last time applies.

Each framework replaced the last because reality outpaced the model. We keep needing new language because what we are experiencing keeps exceeding the last description we had for it.

And here is what every one of those frameworks has in common. They are all about making sense of the external environment. None of them are about the people living inside it.

That is the gap I want to talk about today.

The feeling nobody is naming

Katz has introduced a new framework she calls LO-RAIT: loss of relevance, agency, identity, and trajectory. (Full framework here.) It is an honest description of what happens when the expertise someone spent years building gets replicated by a system that improves weekly.

Claims adjusters, underwriters, business analysts, product people, and virtually every other role in the insurance industry is seeing how its core competencies can now be performed faster, cheaper, and at a scale no human can match. That hits beyond job insecurity -- it hits your identity.

Researchers have started calling it "algorithmic anxiety": workers feeling blindsided by automation decisions, betrayed by employers who promised job security, and increasingly uncertain about the sustainability of any career path. (PMC, 2026)

In insurance, that anxiety goes even deeper because people often stay in the industry precisely because it feels stable. That is part of the pitch we have made to every generation of talent. Insurance is recession-proof. Insurance is built on permanence. Insurance is where you build a career. Mature insurance carriers can grow to over 100 years old, while the rest of the Fortune 500 turns over much more quickly.

"When AI can do the thing that defines you, you lose your identity and the trajectory you were on. I have watched this show up not as anxiety about job security but as grief. Mourning a self that may not exist in two years." -- Tia Katz, Hu-X (Forbes, April 2026)

I think that is true. And I think it is happening inside insurance organizations right now, largely unacknowledged by leadership.

The data underneath the silence

The numbers make this harder to dismiss as anecdotal.

A 2026 ManpowerGroup survey found that AI usage among workers jumped 13 percentage points in a single year, but confidence in using the technology fell 18% over the same period. (Insurance Business, April 2026) More people are using the tools. Fewer feel capable with them -- and that makes a lot of sense for a very fast-advancing technology. Keeping up with innovation in the AI world can feel like a full-time job. That gap between adoption and genuine integration is where a lot of quiet anxiety lives.

Mercer's 2026 Inside Employees' Minds report found that 56% of workers fear job-related consequences from AI, while 70% report increased financial stress from inflation and market volatility. (Carrier Management, February 2026) Workers are not choosing between economic worry and AI worry. They are carrying both at once.

And the safety net underneath all of this was not built for a disruption of this scale. Nearly 75% of unemployed workers do not apply for unemployment benefits -- many because they do not believe they are eligible -- and the system was never designed for people who need to retrain into entirely different work rather than find a similar role in the same field. We already largely failed at retraining those displaced by earlier trade and automation shifts. The US historically has not been great at that. (Fortune, March 2026)

Inside insurance specifically, the picture is pointed. Goldman Sachs research identifies insurance claims professionals among the professions facing the highest AI substitution risk of any occupation. (Goldman Sachs) These are not abstract categories. These are your colleagues. People who have spent careers building expertise in a specific function, now watching that function compress around them.

US employers reported over 1.17 million layoffs in 2025, the highest total since 2020. Job openings have fallen from 12 million in 2022 to roughly 7.5 million today. (Promark, January 2026) Labor market analysts have taken to calling this a "no fire, no hire" era. People are not leaving bad situations because there is nowhere obvious to go. So they stay. And they quietly absorb the stress of not knowing. 

What this looks like inside your organization right now

Katz describes every organization right now as running a split screen. The official narrative on one side: "We are investing in AI to augment our people." The unspoken one on the other: "Am I next?"

I get calls on ChatWithTony.com asking how to stay ahead of the AI wave, and the anxiety is palpable.

The longer that gap stays unnamed, the more energy people spend managing the dissonance instead of doing the work. No polished memo closes it. What closes it is a leader being the first person in the room to say: "I do not know yet, and I am sitting with the same questions you are."

That is harder than it sounds. Insurance culture rewards confidence and expertise. Admitting uncertainty does not come naturally in an industry where your job is literally to assess and price risk. But the leaders who figure out how to hold both -- honest about the uncertainty, steady enough that the team has something to orient by -- are going to have a significant advantage over the ones performing confidence they do not have.

The data supports this directly. Workers who feel their employers are genuinely investing in their skills are 5.3 times as likely to feel their jobs are secure. (ADP Research / Fortune, March 2026) The investment does not have to be large. It has to be visible and real. The difference between an organization people trust and one they are quietly fleeing is often that simple. 

The actual opportunity hiding in all of this

Here is what I keep coming back to.

Every framework -- VUCA, BANI, RUPT, TUNA -- was designed to help organizations navigate external disruption. They are analytical tools for making sense of a chaotic environment. None of them say much about what you owe the people sitting inside that environment with you.

We are experiencing unprecedented change at an unprecedented pace. Nobody has a complete map. The most honest thing any leader can say right now is that we are all figuring this out together.

And maybe that is exactly the opening.

In the middle of a moment defined by technology, where every conversation is about AI timelines and automation percentages and substitution risk, there is a genuine opportunity to do something different. To put the human back in human resources. To build real community inside organizations instead of just managing headcount through disruption. To create space for people to name what they are feeling instead of performing certainty they do not have.

Insurance, of all industries, is built on a specific promise: when things go wrong, someone shows up. We price risk. We absorb losses. We are there at the moment it matters most. That is not just a product description. It is a value system. And right now, that value system has an obvious internal application.

Your people are carrying something. The question is whether your organization is a place they can set it down for a minute, or whether they are carrying it alone.

The organizations that answer that question well in the next two years are not just going to retain better. They are going to attract better. Because the best people have choices, and they are watching how leaders behave right now. They will remember. 

Three things to do this week

1. Have one honest conversation this week with no agenda. Not a check-in. Not a performance conversation. Just: "How are you actually doing with all of this?" And then actually listen to the answer.

2. Audit what your organization is doing that is visible and real on skills investment. Not what is in the strategy deck -- what your people can actually point to. If the answer is thin, that is your retention problem hiding in plain sight.

3. Name the split screen out loud in your next team meeting. Acknowledge that the official narrative and the unspoken one are both in the room. You do not need answers. You need to show people they are not carrying the uncertainty alone.

The frameworks will keep changing. The pace is not slowing down. But the people inside your organization are the same people they were before any of this. They just need to know someone is thinking about them and not just the technology.

That is not soft. That is strategy. 

-- Tony

🎙️ From the Podcast

Bill Devine, Managing Partner at Naitiv

Naitiv just launched to help companies in financial services actually implement AI. They believe it is not a technology problem -- it is a business problem.

"We went back to first principles. Why is adoption of AI so bad? If you take it apart it gets really simple really fast. 1. Really antiquated workflows. Somebody told me a great analogy: Trying to bring AI to insurance is like trying to attach a jet engine to a horse and buggy."

🎧 Listen | 📺 Watch

💬 Tony's Take

The next time you look at your retention numbers and feel good about them, I want you to ask one more question: why are they staying?

Because if 64% of your workforce is staying out of fear rather than engagement, that number is not a win. It is a warning. A team operating in survival mode is not building anything. They are waiting. And waiting is not a culture.

The best retention strategy I know of is also the simplest one: make people feel like someone in leadership sees them as a human being and not just a line item in a workforce plan. In the middle of all this noise about technology, that has never been easier to stand out on. Because almost nobody is doing it.

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