Gates is right that there's no plan. Your employees can't wait for one

By Kristian Merenda, Partner

Bill Gates published an essay last week called "The turbulent AI era is here," and the line that has stayed with us is the flattest one in it: "There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era."

He's right. His answer is a big one. He wants new national bodies that cut across agencies, since a labor department understands workforce disruption but not security risk, and a business regulator understands market concentration but not what AI does to teenagers. An international organization, modeled in part on nuclear weapons inspections and aviation regulation, would handle what no single country can manage alone. And he wants a tax on AI tokens and robots, on the grounds that the current tax code nudges you toward buying a machine rather than hiring a person. He also floats a category he calls Human Reserved: work we agree to keep for people, the way we agree to leave certain land undeveloped. Gates also says plainly that building it will take years and require the United States and China to cooperate. It's a case for doing both, not a reason to wait.

Your people are reading the headlines. How is anyone supposed to trust something they have been told will replace them, make them obsolete, and upend how they work, who they work with, and whether they keep doing the work at all?

Mark Cuban has said it more simply. "AI is never the answer; AI is the tool." He has argued that the strongest check on displacement is economic rather than technical, since a capable agent runs six figures a year and still behaves like "a college intern that comes in hungover, makes mistakes, and doesn't take responsibility for them." His framing points at the more useful question: not whether AI takes over, but what you choose to do with the tool once you have it. And that decision is yours to make, right now.

Just Capital put a number on it this year: 30% of the public fear significant AI-driven layoffs, against just 13% of corporate leaders who expect large-scale job losses to be the primary outcome of AI adoption over the next two to three years. That's a seventeen-point gap, and the public in that survey is also, in all likelihood, your own workforce. The same company, in its report out this week, found part of the reason the gap hasn't closed: of the 1,002 largest companies in America, nearly half disclose nothing about how they govern AI, and only 14% will publicly commit to keeping a human in the loop. 

When leadership stays silent about that gap, employees won't generally stay silent either. They fill it in themselves, and in the worst cases, with a story that costs the company their trust. Closing the disclosure gap doesn't take new legislation or years of institution-building. It takes an organization willing to get clear and honest about what it actually stands for and to let that answer govern the decisions it is making when it deploys AI.

At CCOP, we define purpose simply: an organization's reason for being beyond profits, grounded in humanity, aligned with real benefit for the colleagues, customers, and communities it affects. That benefit has to run in both directions. Purpose-led companies carry less reputational risk, build deeper relationships with the people who buy from them and work for them, and direct investment toward the parts of the business that grow it, the same parts that make life better for the people around it. In our Purpose Paradox research with the Harris Poll, we found that one in five employees are genuinely connected to their company's purpose. We call them Believers, and their impact is nowhere near proportional to their numbers. They defend that company to critics 96% of the time, which makes them more than a loyal fifth of your workforce; they are your most effective influencers, the ones shaping what customers, colleagues, and communities come to believe about you. Their numbers aren't fixed. A company's proportion of Believers can grow when it lives its purpose.

It's one sign in a litany of research pointing in the same direction. Great Place to Work has tracked its 100 Best Companies list against the broader market for nearly three decades: those companies delivered a 3,175% cumulative return since 1998, more than triple the Russell 3000's 907% over the same stretch. That has a material impact on the business.

How organizations adopt and integrate AI is one of the clearest tests of whether they stand for something of real value to society and whether they are actually living their purpose. AI that isn't aligned with your purpose shows up in the choices you make, intentionally or not: whether efficiency wins at the expense of the people it was supposed to serve, or which functions an organization affirms must stay human-led. Which functions those are is a question of purpose before it is a question of technology. The organizations getting this right are treating it that way, not as words on a wall but as a governance layer, shaping the data they train on, the guardrails they set, and the decisions where a human stays in the loop.

Start with the data. Sony AI released FHIBE in November 2025, the first publicly available, consent-based image dataset built specifically to test AI systems for bias: 10,318 images of nearly 2,000 people across more than 80 countries, every person paid and free to revoke consent at any time. When Sony tested existing AI models against it, not one fully passed. Alice Xiang, who leads AI governance there, has called the industry's usual alternative "ethics nihilism," skipping the fairness check entirely because no responsible dataset existed to run it against. FHIBE is Sony's answer: purpose enforced at the data level, before a single output ever gets generated.

Bank of America is doing that on the people side, and it's no more a finished model than Sony’s is. It is upskilling more than 200,000 people through its Academy, pairing technical AI skills with human ones like judgment and adaptability, and mapping out in advance exactly where human oversight must remain. Every employee going through a transition like this ends up asking some version of the same question: as AI takes on more, what's actually left for me to do, and does it still matter? Bank of America's approach is attempting to answer that before employees have to ask it themselves.

TELUS has done something similar, letting its own employees build with the tool instead of being relegated to end-user status. They report that over two years, 57,000 of their people have used generative AI to build more than 13,000 solutions of their own, saving the company 500,000 hours and, by its own estimate, 90 million dollars. Those solutions ranged from an internal tool that surfaces HR policy answers on demand to a real-time translator for teams working across languages and a brand guidelines assistant that keeps materials consistent without a design review queue. Some of the builders were senior leaders who hadn't written a line of code in years, now building their own tools to streamline daily work. TELUS backed that with a human-in-the-loop and an automated system, Fuel iX Fortify, that tests its own AI before anything reaches a customer. That discipline is what earned it the first-in-the-world certification for privacy by design. Same idea as Bank of America's map: don't just hand people a finished tool and walk away, give them the tool and let them own how it gets used.

So bring people in. Together, decide what should be automated to unleash human capability and creativity, and what should always stay human. Ensure guardrails are in place that align AI with your purpose, one that serves society beyond profits. Continue human engagement and oversight once programs go live, always as co-creators, not recipients. We don't yet know everything this era will cost or give back to our companies, communities, and our planet, but that uncertainty doesn't excuse us from trying to be an absolute force for good. No one will determine whether we get that right more than all of us, today's leaders and workforce, who should be doing the work to lay the safe, prosperous, and valuable foundation for generations to come. Let's start there.