This subject has stayed with me for a while. I work with leaders who watch their teams erode — not noisily, but in silence. Competent people, doing their job, who are no longer really there. It is not an organisational or a salary problem. It is a problem of meaning, of contact, of presence. And AI, paradoxically, may be the first technology to offer a real way out of that impasse — if we choose to take it.
The real problem organisations face today
Organisational disengagement is the state in which people complete their tasks without investing their energy, creativity or real presence. It shows up as absenteeism, turnover and a decline in collective intelligence — and it stems less from a lack of resources than from a lack of meaning and connection.
There is a lot of talk about an engagement crisis. The figures circulate: a third of employees describe themselves as actively disengaged, absenteeism costs billions, turnover is accelerating in almost every sector. Leadership responds with tools: engagement surveys, mobility plans, flexibility policies, four-day weeks.
Those responses are not wrong. But they treat symptoms. The illness is elsewhere.
What I observe, from inside the organisations I work with, is something both deeper and simpler: an absence of being. People do. They produce, deliver, respond, optimise, report. Sometimes they do it very well. But they are no longer really there . Not really in contact with themselves, not really in contact with each other.
We have built entire organisations around doing. Indicators to measure the doing, meetings to coordinate the doing, training to improve the doing. And somewhere along the way, we lost the being.
« Absenteeism and turnover are not HR problems. They are messages. And the message says: I no longer feel alive here. »
What AI changes — really
Artificial intelligence lands in this context as a major disruption. And leaders are right to be watchful: yes, it automates tasks. Yes, it will transform professions. Yes, it creates anxiety in teams.
But there is something almost nobody says loudly enough: AI is the first technology in history to take on the doing in a significant way — drafting, summarising, analysing, researching, formatting, repetitive planning. Everything that occupied people's heads, time and energy for hours every week.
What it frees up — if we choose it — is something new: time and mental space for something else.
For what? For real conversation. For thinking things through. For listening, nuanced decisions, relationship. For everything that cannot be automated because it requires genuine human presence — and which is precisely what our organisations lack.
Mental load: the invisible enemy of connection
There is something we systematically underestimate in organisational exhaustion: mental load does not come (only) from the volume of work. It comes from the number of things held in mind permanently.
Someone in a meeting who still has twenty tabs open in their head is not really in the meeting. They are physically present and mentally absent. And that absence is contagious — it spreads through teams, it creates things left unsaid, it impoverishes exchanges, it erodes trust.
AI can take on a large part of that cognitive noise. Reminders, minutes, first drafts, monitoring, summaries. Not so that people do more — but so that they can finally be where they are, when they are there.
That is a radical shift. Not more productivity: productivity displaced towards the machine, in order to recover presence displaced towards the human.
« It is not AI that will give work its meaning back. It is what we do with the time it frees. »
Real collective intelligence does not exist in the noise
I have been running collective processes for years. And I can tell you this: real collective intelligence — not the gathering of opinions, not brainstorming for show, but the moment a group genuinely thinks together and produces something no individual could have produced alone — is rare. Extraordinarily rare.
Why? Because it requires conditions our organisations almost never meet. It requires people who are genuinely present, not half elsewhere in their heads. It requires a quality of listening and self-exposure that is only possible when you are not in survival mode. It requires time that cannot be immediately monetised.
Those are exactly the conditions AI can begin to create — if we decide to use it not to do more, but to be better together.
And when those conditions exist, the results are of a different order. The solutions a genuinely present collective generates are more creative, more robust, more accepted. Decisions taken in that space have a different quality. And the people who come out of it are different too — less exhausted, more engaged, with the sense of contributing to something that matters.
What this means for leaders
If all of the above holds, then the question for leaders is not « how do we use AI to perform better? » It is: « how do we use AI to create the conditions for a more human organisation? »
What does that look like concretely?
- Reduce cognitive noise — delegate to AI everything that can be delegated, to free attention for the moments that count.
- Reinvest the freed-up time in the quality of relationships — fewer meetings but more present ones, deep conversations rather than surface briefings.
- Train teams not in AI but in presence — listening, emotional regulation, the capacity to disagree without losing yourself. That is what is missing, and no tool develops it on people's behalf.
- Treat absenteeism and turnover at their source — not with bonuses, but with the question: do the people who work here feel seen, heard, useful?
Why human support is more necessary than before
There is an irony in all this. The more space AI takes inside organisations, the more strategic the work on the human becomes — and the harder it is to do alone.
Because creating spaces of presence, of true dialogue, of collective intelligence cannot be improvised. It requires a third presence, someone who is not playing the organisation's internal game, who can see what the people inside no longer see, and who knows how to hold a space in which something different can happen.
That is exactly the work I have been doing for years — before AI, and now with AI as the backdrop. Helping organisations step out of do-do-do mode and recover something more essential: the quality of the bond between the people who make them up.
Not because it is nice. Because it determines, in the end, whether people stay or leave, whether they engage or fade, whether the organisation invents or repeats itself.
« AI replaces the doing. What it frees up is your only real competitive advantage: the human quality of your organisation. »
In short: what AI makes possible, if we choose it
- Reduce people's mental load → less exhaustion, less absenteeism
- Free up time for deeper exchanges → more engagement, less turnover
- Create the conditions for real collective intelligence → more creative and more robust solutions
- Let managers become human again, rather than pipeline supervisors → authority grounded in presence rather than control
- Give organisations a reason to reinvest in human development — not as a cost, but as leverage
All of this is possible. None of it is automatic. AI does not transform organisations. People choose what they do with the time it frees — and sometimes they need support to make that choice.