How should bosses talk about AI?
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Business | Bartleby<br>How should bosses talk about AI?<br>Employees are being asked to embrace a technology that causes fear<br>Share
Illustration: Paul Blow
May 28th 2026|4 min read
If you are a bank boss and in the headlines, you are either Jamie Dimon or you have screwed up. Bill Winters, the chief executive of Standard Chartered, an emerging-markets bank headquartered in Britain, made waves recently when he talked about a planned 15% reduction in back-office jobs over the next four years. Four words in particular landed him in trouble: a reference to the replacement of “lower-value human capital” by financial capital invested in automation. The kerfuffle provides an instructive case study in a problem now faced by almost every manager: how to talk about the effect of artificial intelligence on jobs.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “How should bosses talk about AI?”
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