Every leader knows the conversation is coming. Employees are watching AI move into their workflows and wondering what it means for their future. Most leaders respond with silence, vague reassurances, or nothing at all. Margaret Keane thinks that's a mistake, and the cost of that silence shows up in culture long before it shows up in a turnover report.
Margaret is the CEO of Cisive and a seasoned executive who has led large organizations through complex regulatory environments and periods of significant change. On this episode of Don't Get Played, she sits down with host Sarah O'Melia to talk about culture, trust, and what it actually takes to lead through uncertainty, including the uncertainty that AI is generating right now.
Her argument is not that the disruption isn't real. It's that most leaders are letting their employees sit alone with it. Staying silent while the work changes around your team is not a neutral choice. It's a signal, and employees read it.
Employees are not imagining the threat. AI is changing how work gets done, and they know it. What most of them are not getting is any honest signal from the people responsible for their teams.
"I think there's a lot of noise around, you know, ‘AI is going to take all the jobs away.’ And I do think there's going to be a big transformation with AI, but that doesn't mean everyone's job is going away," Margaret says.
Most leaders know this. Very few are saying it out loud, and the vacuum that silence creates is filled with anxiety, rumors, and disengagement that no team can overcome.
The more useful frame for the future of work is not about what AI will eliminate but about what organizations do with the productivity gains. "How do we make jobs better? What does that mean for the person who maybe had some role in that? How can we make their job better? And then how do we take some of this productivity that we are going to gain out of AI and put it towards growth?" Margaret asks.
Those questions reorient the whole conversation away from threat and toward intention. AI as a cost-cutting lever is a choice leaders make, not an outcome that arrives on its own. Leaders who talk about it that way give their employees something to hold onto. Leaders who say nothing leave them to draw their own conclusions.
The AI conversation does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a broader pattern of how leaders communicate, and Margaret ties it directly to trust.
When something is broken and employees already know it, silence does not protect anyone. "I think you gain trust when, let's say there's a problem we've had for a long time — we haven't fixed it, we haven't addressed it. We need to be clear and transparent on why," Margaret says. That means telling people where things actually stand, giving a realistic timeline, and following up when that timeline arrives. Whether the problem is fixed or still delayed, the communication has to continue. That kind of follow-through builds more credibility than any all-hands talking point.
The same applies to AI. Employees who are worried and hear nothing from leadership do not conclude that everything is fine. They conclude that leadership either does not know or does not care, and both interpretations erode the trust leaders need as change accelerates.
The leaders and teams that come through an AI transition intact will not be the ones that got lucky. They will be the ones built for it, and that starts with hiring decisions made right now.
As AI becomes a bigger part of how work gets done, Margaret says, the cultural pressure on organizations is going to increase, not decrease. "People are going to be using agents in their jobs. We have to really pay attention to how that's going to shift the culture, because it will. So the culture we have today may not 100 percent be the culture we have tomorrow, but we want to make sure we are holding onto those values that are really important to us, and we do not lose them in this transformation that we are making," she says.
That means the people coming into an organization right now need to be evaluated not just on whether they can do the job as it exists today, but on whether they can move with it. "I think where people fall astray in this hiring process is maybe you get too hung up on the skill sets for the job and are not spending enough time on the culture side," Margaret says. Hiring leaders who are rigid, who resist change, or who cannot bring a team along through uncertainty is a liability that compounds as AI reshapes the work around them.
Rushing that evaluation because a seat is open is exactly the wrong response to a moment that is already moving fast enough. The employees worried about AI replacing jobs need leaders who are equipped to have the hard conversations, model adaptability, and hold the culture together while the work changes. That is not a profile you can screen for in a single interview, and it is not something you can afford to get wrong right now.