I’ve spent more than 45 years in customer and technical support.

I’ve been on the calls when payroll didn’t process the night before. I’ve sat with customers who were stressed, frustrated, and sometimes in tears because something critical broke at the worst possible time.

And now? I use AI every single day. I believe in it. I see the future.

But what I’m watching companies try to do right now with AI in customer support—especially in call centers—is moving faster than reality can support. And that’s where things start to break.

AI is powerful. It’s not magic.

Let’s be honest.

AI is great at handling repetitive questions, quickly surfacing knowledge, and supporting agents behind the scenes. Implemented well, it can absolutely transform support.

But here’s what’s getting missed: AI doesn’t understand your business. It reflects what it’s been trained on. If your documentation is messy, outdated, or incomplete, AI doesn’t fix that.

It scales it.

You don’t get empathy out of the box

You can train tone. You can guide language. You can simulate care.

But real empathy—the kind that builds trust in a stressful moment—still comes from human experience. And the research is catching up to what anyone who’s worked in support already knows.

SurveyMonkey found that just 8% of customers prefer AI to human agents in customer service, while 90% prefer human agents because they better understand their needs. Recent surveys now rank interacting with AI chatbots among the most frustrating parts of contacting a business, second only to being placed on hold.

The pattern is clear: customers still want humans when it matters.

The myth of the “95% AI call center”

There’s a number that shows up in almost every AI customer service pitch: “By 2025, 95% of customer interactions will be AI-powered.”

That stat traces back to a 2017 prediction from Servion Global Solutions, which has been recycled ever since. And here’s the problem: “AI-powered” gets interpreted as “fully handled by AI,” when what it really means is that AI touches the interaction in some way—routing the call, suggesting an answer, summarizing the ticket, helping the agent draft a response.

That nuance gets lost. Executives hear “95% AI” and start setting targets that aren’t grounded in how any of this actually works.

Here’s what credible, current research actually says:

• Gartner predicts that by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve about 80% of common customer service issues—not all issues. Common ones. And by 2029, not next quarter.

• Zendesk’s 2025 CX Trends report found roughly three out of four CX leaders expect around 80% of interactions to be resolved without a human agent in the next few years. Expectation, not reality.

• Real deployments at large companies are landing in the mid-40s to around 50% containment for routine queries, with the rest still going to humans. And those results are considered good.

Read that again: the wins are landing in the 45–50% range. Even the best, well-executed implementations still send more than half of tickets to a human.

So when you hear a company announcing “95% AI customer service,” one of three things is happening. They’re using a generous definition of “AI-powered.” They’re chasing a number that doesn’t exist in the real world. Or they’re about to learn the hard way.

Because not all support is created equal.

There’s a big difference between “How do I reset my password?” and “My payroll didn’t run, and I have employees expecting checks tomorrow.” One is transactional. The other is emotional, urgent, and high-stakes.

In those moments, customers don’t want a chatbot. They want a human who understands what’s at risk.

The realistic, sustainable target that current research supports is around 70–80% automation of truly routine queries, with the remaining 20–30% handled by humans. Anyone aiming much higher is either redefining “AI-powered” or about to repeat someone else’s painful lessons.

This isn’t AI failing. This is leadership rushing.

What AI still can’t do

Even the best AI today has real limitations:

• Ambiguous problems

• Complex configurations

• Edge cases that aren’t clearly documented

• Cross-product issues

• Emotional nuance

• Real empathy in the middle of a crisis

Those are still human strengths.

And then there’s hallucination

Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough—and the one I ran into just this morning.

AI hallucinates. It will give you a confident, polished, completely wrong answer and serve it up like it just handed you the truth on a silver platter.

And it can do this even when you attach a reference document and tell it, “Use this. Only this.”

I had it happen today. I gave the model a source document. I asked a specific question. It pulled an answer that wasn’t in the document, dressed it up nicely, and presented it as fact. If I hadn’t already known the right answer, I would have walked away with bad information and never questioned it.

That’s me—someone who uses AI all day, every day, and knows to double-check.

Now imagine the same dynamic in a customer support center. A customer asks about a refund policy. The AI confidently invents one. Or misstates a warranty term. Or fabricates a feature that doesn’t exist. The customer takes that answer at face value, makes a decision based on it, and the company is now on the hook for whatever the AI said.

This is not theoretical. In Moffatt v. Air Canada, a Canadian tribunal held the airline liable after its chatbot gave misleading information about bereavement fares. Air Canada argued the chatbot was a separate entity. The tribunal wasn’t buying it.

And here’s the part that surprises many leaders: giving AI your documentation does not eliminate this risk. The technical term for connecting models to internal content is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and it absolutely helps. But it’s not a fix. AI can still synthesize two correct documents into one wrong answer. It can pull the wrong passage. It can fill a gap with something that sounds right but isn’t.

Evaluations of grounded AI systems show hallucination rates ranging from a few percent up into the low 20s, depending on the setup. Domain-specific legal AI tools have hallucinated at rates in the high teens to low 30s on certain tasks.

In a payroll emergency, a benefits question, or a billing dispute, those error rates aren’t acceptable.

A human who doesn’t know the answer says, “Let me find out.” By default, AI says *something*. And in customer support, “something” can be more dangerous than “I don’t know.”

This is fixable. It takes guardrails, validation layers, confidence thresholds, and a clear path to a human the moment the AI isn’t sure. It takes process, not just a prompt.

None of that exists in a “95% AI call center” built on a tight timeline and a smaller payroll. It exists in an AI program built thoughtfully—by people who understand both the technology and what’s at stake when it gets it wrong.

Let’s name what’s actually happening

A lot of these “AI transformations” aren’t really about AI.

They’re about private equity firms and finance leaders looking at a balance sheet, seeing a big customer support line item, and deciding that AI is the cheapest way to shrink it. The AI story is the press release. The spreadsheet is the strategy.

That’s not responsible AI adoption.

That’s cost-cutting wearing an AI costume.

Forrester Research, reported in outlets like HR Executive and The Register, found that roughly 55% of employers regret layoffs they attributed to AI, and about half of those roles get quietly rehired, often offshore or at lower pay. That’s not transformation. That’s arbitrage dressed up in better language.

And it’s giving AI a bad name.

People who actually love this technology—people like me—are watching this play out and getting frustrated. Because every customer is stuck in a chatbot loop, every payroll that doesn’t process while a bot asks them to rephrase the question, every employee training their replacement on the way out, adds to a growing narrative that AI can’t be trusted.

AI can be trusted. The humans rushing it cannot always be.

Nobody is putting the human cost on the spreadsheet

Before we get to the framework, let’s talk about the part that’s easy to skip in a LinkedIn post.

When a company announces it’s moving to “AI-first support,” there are people on the other side of that sentence. People with mortgages. Kids in college. Parents to care for. People who spent years—sometimes decades—building the exact expertise the company is now trying to compress into a model in a matter of months.

Some of them are being asked to train their replacements on the way out.

Let that sit for a minute.

And the ones who stay? They carry more. More workload, more guilt, more anxiety about when they’ll be next. Psychological safety erodes. Engagement tanks. Institutional knowledge walks out the door with every layoff, and you don’t get it back.

You can’t automate your way out of that cost. It shows up in your culture, in your Glassdoor reviews, in the quality of service your customers eventually receive. It shows up in the people who stay and stop bringing their best, because—honestly—why would they?

If you’re a leader reading this: the people doing this work aren’t a line item. They’re the reason your customers trust you in the first place.

A better way forward

AI should enhance support. It should not replace the human connection that makes support work in the first place.

Here’s a model that actually holds up in the real world.

Phase 1: Stabilize your foundation. Before AI touches anything, clean up your knowledge base, identify your most common support issues, and standardize responses. If your foundation isn’t solid, AI will amplify the cracks.

Phase 2: Augment your team. Use AI to support your people. Let it draft responses, surface answers faster, and take the first pass. Let agents review, personalize, and stay in control. This builds trust internally before you ever expose customers to it. A Harvard Business School study of more than 250,000 chat conversations found that AI assistance helped human agents respond about 20% faster—and with more empathy and thoroughness, especially for less-experienced agents.

Phase 3: Automate carefully. Only automate what’s repetitive, well documented, and low-risk. Not everything should be automated, and that’s okay. Beyond a realistic ceiling for routine queries, you’re crossing into territory where human judgment and empathy matter most.

Phase 4: Keep humans in the loop. Always provide an easy path to a human. Monitor AI responses for accuracy. Improve continuously based on real feedback from both customers and frontline staff. AI should never be a dead end.

What leaders need to do right now

This isn’t just a technology decision. It’s a leadership decision.

If you’re a CEO or executive, stop chasing AI headlines and start asking better questions. Not “What can we save?” but “What experience are we creating?” Invest in your knowledge systems before you invest in automation. Measure trust and customer satisfaction, not just cost reduction. If your AI business case falls apart the moment you factor in quality, turnover, and the eventual rehiring bill, it was never a real business case.

If you lead operations or support, map your support tickets. Figure out what’s actually repetitive versus what requires judgment. Build clear escalation paths. Train your teams to work with AI, not fear it. Fear does not produce good service.

If you’re on the frontline, you are still the trust builders. Use AI as a tool, not a replacement for your judgment. Speak up when something doesn’t feel right. Keep bringing the human side—empathy, reassurance, clarity. That’s the part no model has figured out yet.

Final thought

AI isn’t the problem.

The problem is that when we move faster than our systems, our people, and our customers are ready for, we end up leaving people behind. When we treat AI as a cost-cutting tool instead of a capability worth building well. When we forget that the people we’re replacing spent years earning the trust the company now takes for granted.

Get this right, and AI can elevate customer support in ways we’ve never seen before.

Rush it? We risk breaking the very thing that makes support work in the first place.

Trust.

And trust is still—and always will be—human.

References

1. SurveyMonkey, Customer Service Statistics 2026: Humans vs AI Trends.

2. GrooveHQ, 55 AI Customer Support Statistics for 2026.

3. Lorikeet CX, AI Customer Service Statistics: 30 Data Points for 2026.

4. Gartner, Agentic AI Will Autonomously Resolve 80% of Common Customer Service Issues Without Human Intervention by 2029.

5. Forrester research on AI-attributed layoffs and rehiring, via HR Executive and The Register.

6. Harvard Business School — Shunyuan Zhang & Das Narayandas, When AI Chatbots Help People Act More Human.

7. Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149.

8. Industry and vendor reports on AI containment and resolution rates in large deployments.

9. Benchmarks on AI hallucination rates in grounded/RAG systems and legal AI tools.

Here’s something nobody tells you about being a solopreneur with ADHD:

The problem usually isn’t motivation.

It’s not that you don’t care. It’s not that you don’t know what needs to get done.

The problem is that your brain is running seventeen tabs at once, you genuinely cannot tell if you’ve been working for 20 minutes or three hours, and by 2pm, you’ve done a lot of things but somehow none of the right things.

Sound familiar?

I talk about this openly because I think many of us are living it but not saying it out loud.

I’m Gretchen. I run Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions, a consulting firm focused on building healthier, more human-centered workplaces. I also co-host a mental health podcast called Sh!t That Goes On In Our Heads, where my co-host and I dig into the real stuff: not the polished version of life, but the messy, honest, “my brain won’t cooperate today” kind of conversations.

And across both of those worlds, I wear somewhere around ten hats on any given day.

HR technology consulting. Client work. Podcast production. Content creation. Community building. Business development.

I love all of it. I also know exactly how quickly it can tip from purposeful to completely overwhelming.

The Part Most Productivity Advice Gets Wrong

I’ve tried a lot of systems over the years.

Planners. Frameworks. Apps. Time blocking strategies. Color-coded calendars that looked beautiful and lasted approximately four days.

Most of them share the same flaw: they assume linear thinking.

Step one. Step two. Step three.

But that’s not how my brain works. And honestly? It’s not how many creative, high-capacity people think, either. We don’t move in straight lines. We move in spirals, in bursts, in sudden clarity at 11 pm and total fog at 10 am.

What I needed wasn’t a stricter system.

I needed something that could think alongside me.

What LittleBird Actually Does (For Real, Not Marketing Speak)

A few months ago, I started using LittleBird AI, and I want to be honest with you, the way I always try to be:

I don’t recommend things I don’t believe in. I’m not here to sell you something shiny.

This one is different, and I’ll tell you exactly why.

LittleBird helps me do three things that have genuinely changed how I function day to day.

It helps me set up my day with intention. Not a vague to-do list. An actual plan that reflects what I need to get done and when. I start my morning knowing what I’m walking into instead of opening my laptop and immediately getting swallowed by whatever is loudest.

It tracks how I’m actually spending my time. This one surprised me the most. I thought I knew where my hours were going. I did not. LittleBird showed me the gaps between where I thought I was spending my energy and where I actually was. That kind of clarity? It’s uncomfortable and completely necessary.

It keeps me on track. For a brain that drifts (and mine absolutely drifts), having something that helps me stay anchored to what matters without making me feel like I’m failing every time I get distracted has been a quiet kind of relief.

It doesn’t feel like a rigid system. It feels like a thinking partner that understands I’m a human being, not a productivity machine.

Why This Matters Beyond Just Getting Things Done

I want to say something here that feels important.

There’s a version of productivity culture that teaches us to squeeze more out of ourselves. More output. More efficiency. More, more, more.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

What I’ve experienced with LittleBird is something closer to sustainability. To mental clarity. To end the day feeling like I actually showed up for my work instead of just surviving it.

As someone who teaches burnout prevention and psychological safety in the workplace, I pay attention to whether tools are built for people or built for performance metrics. You can feel the difference.

LittleBird feels like it was designed by people who understand that a scattered, overwhelmed brain isn’t a broken brain. It just needs better support.

That matters to me. A lot.

If Any of This Sounds Like Your Brain Too

If you’re a solopreneur, a creator, a small business owner, a caregiver, or just someone who has a lot going on and a brain that doesn’t always cooperate with the plan…

This is worth trying.

👉 https://littlebird.ai/

Use my referral code: 85RTGZKJ

We both get 2 free months of Plus. No pressure, no strings. Just a genuine “this helped me, and it might help you too.”

At the center of everything I do (the consulting work, the podcast, the conversations) is one belief:

We don’t need more pressure to perform.

We need better support to be human.

Sometimes that support is a conversation. Sometimes it’s the community. And sometimes it’s finding the right tool at exactly the right time.

This has been one of those tools for me.

Gretchen Schoser is the owner of Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions and co-host of Sh!t That Goes On In Our Heads, a mental health podcast with 4.5 million downloads across 160+ countries. She writes about mental wellness, workplace culture, and the very real experience of running a business while being a whole, complicated human.

“If you’re not grinding, you’re falling behind.”

That’s the message plastered across social media, echoed in team meetings, and quietly reinforced every time someone gets praised for answering emails at midnight.

In small teams where everyone’s energy is visible, hustle culture doesn’t just burn people out. It destroys the foundation of trust.

Because when overwork becomes the measure of value, people stop being honest about their limits.

The Illusion That Busy Means Better

Somewhere along the way, we confused activity with achievement.

Leaders started rewarding hours over outcomes. Teams started competing over who worked the latest, who skipped lunch, who never used their PTO.

And people learned a dangerous lesson: rest is weakness.

In small and midsize businesses, this becomes especially toxic. There’s no corporate buffer. No anonymous surveys. No HR department running interference.

When the leader glorifies grind, the whole team feels it. And loyalty becomes measured by exhaustion.

I Know This Because I Watched It Happen

Let me tell you about Sarah.

Sarah was brilliant. Creative. The kind of person who could solve problems others didn’t even see coming. She worked for a growing tech startup, 22 people total, where “work hard, play hard” was printed on the break room wall.

At first, Sarah loved it. The energy felt electric. Everyone was all in.

But then the all in became all the time.

Sarah started staying late because her manager did. She answered Slack messages on weekends because everyone else did. She stopped mentioning she was tired because the team celebrated people who powered through.

Her performance reviews were glowing. Internally, she was falling apart.

One Tuesday morning, Sarah didn’t show up. No call. No message. Her manager panicked.

When they finally reached her, she said five words that should haunt every leader:

“I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

Sarah wasn’t lazy. She wasn’t uncommitted. She was surviving a culture that mistook burnout for loyalty.

That’s the cost of hustle culture. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly erodes trust until people disappear.

The Data Tells the Story Leadership Often Ignores

This isn’t anecdotal. The research is clear:

• Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace consistently shows that burnout is a systemic issue, not a personal failing. Employees experiencing burnout are 63% more likely to take sick days and 2.6 times more likely to actively search for a new job.

• The World Health Organization classified burnout as an occupational phenomenon in 2019, emphasizing that it results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

• Harvard Business Review found that organizations prioritizing sustainable performance over constant availability see higher creativity, better problem solving, and stronger team cohesion.

• The American Psychological Association reports that workplace stress costs U.S. businesses an estimated $500 billion annually in lost productivity, with hustle culture being a significant driver.

When leaders normalize overwork, they don’t just risk individual health. They risk the entire culture.

Why This Destroys Small Teams Faster

In larger organizations, people can hide. In small teams, they can’t.

When someone is struggling, everyone notices. When someone burns out, the ripple is immediate. When trust breaks, there’s nowhere to recover quietly.

Hustle culture in small teams creates a specific kind of damage:

• It punishes honesty — people learn to hide exhaustion to avoid being seen as uncommitted

• It rewards performance theater — looking busy becomes more valuable than actual results

• It silences boundaries — asking for time off feels like letting the team down

• It normalizes crisis mode — urgency becomes constant, making real emergencies invisible

In small businesses, culture isn’t written in a handbook. It’s modeled by leadership every single day.

And when leaders glorify grind, people don’t feel safe saying, “I need to stop.”

What Sustainable Leadership Actually Looks Like

Breaking hustle culture doesn’t mean lowering standards. It means redefining what excellence actually requires.

Leadership practices that rebuild trust and sustainability:

• Model rest as a leadership value — take your PTO, leave on time sometimes, stop sending late night messages. Your team is watching.

• Celebrate outcomes, not hours — praise the quality of work and problem solving, not who stayed latest or worked through lunch.

• Ask about capacity before adding workload — “Do you have bandwidth for this?” should be a standard question, not an afterthought.

• Make boundaries explicit and safe — normalize saying no, delegating, and protecting personal time without fear of judgment.

• Provide accessible mental health support — platforms like Calmerry offer flexible, stigma-free counseling that meets people where they are, without adding to their overwhelm.

Trust doesn’t grow in grind. It grows in honesty.

A Pause Worth Taking

If someone on your team seems distant, disengaged, or going through the motions, pause before assuming they don’t care.

They may be exhausted.
They may be protecting themselves.
They may be waiting to see if it’s safe to tell the truth.

Leadership isn’t about pushing harder. It’s about creating conditions where people can do their best work without sacrificing their wellbeing.

Sometimes the most powerful thing a leader can say is:

“You don’t have to prove your worth by running yourself into the ground.”

A Question for Reflection

As a leader, how are you contributing to hustle culture — even unintentionally — and what would it look like to model sustainable excellence instead?

Let’s Continue This Conversation

If this resonated with you, you’re not alone in rethinking what healthy productivity really means.

At Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions, I work with leaders who are ready to build cultures where people can thrive without burning out. If you’re exploring what sustainable, trust-based leadership can look like in your organization, I’d love to talk.

Schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation

You can also connect with me on my podcast, “Sh!t That Goes On In Our Heads,” where we have honest conversations about mental health, leadership, and the real challenges of being human at work.

Thank you for reading, for reflecting, and for caring enough to do this work differently.

With gratitude,
Gretchen Schoser
Founder, Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions

Sources:

• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2023

• World Health Organization, International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), 2019

• Harvard Business Review, “The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies,” 2015

• American Psychological Association, “Stress in America™ 2023: A Nation Recovering from Collective Trauma”

Your best employees are not speaking up.

Not because they don’t care. Not because they’re disengaged. Not because they lack opinions.

They’ve stopped speaking up because they’ve learned it doesn’t matter.

And that silence? It’s draining your culture, eroding trust, and costing you far more than a resignation letter ever will.

The Quiet Exodus You’re Not Tracking

Most leaders track turnover. They measure exit interviews. They analyze resignation patterns.

But what about the people who stay and go silent?

The employees who:

• Stop raising concerns

• Stop offering ideas

• Stop challenging flawed decisions

• Stop believing their voice holds weight

This is the exodus that doesn’t show up in your attrition data. And it’s far more damaging than someone leaving.

Because when employees silence themselves, they’re not just withholding feedback. They’re protecting what’s left of their mental health from a system that punished honesty.

I Know This Because I Became That Silent Employee

For years, I worked under a manager who was both a narcissist and a misogynist.

I tried addressing the situation. I raised concerns. I documented patterns. I followed the proper channels. Nothing changed.

So I made a choice that felt like survival: I went silent.

Not because I didn’t care about the work. Not because I wasn’t capable. I stopped speaking because every attempt to be honest was met with dismissal, defensiveness, or retaliation.

My mental health tanked. I knew I should leave. But finding another job required energy I simply didn’t have. So I stayed, became smaller, and waited.

Eventually, the manager moved on. But the damage lingered.

And I know I’m not alone.

This exact scenario plays out in companies every single day. Talented, committed employees endure toxic dynamics because they lack the capacity to leave or the belief that speaking up will matter.

Leadership often labels this as disengagement. It’s not. It’s resignation to a culture that punishes truth.

The Data Leaders Can’t Afford to Ignore

Workplace silence isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s measurably destructive.

• Gallup reports that employees who don’t feel heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel burned out and significantly more likely to leave within the year.

• Harvard Business Review research shows that lack of psychological safety, where employees fear speaking up, directly correlates with decreased innovation, lower performance, and compromised decision making.

• The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that poor workplace communication costs U.S. companies an estimated $37 billion annually in lost productivity, mistakes, and preventable turnover.

• The American Psychological Association emphasizes that environments where employees cannot voice concerns contribute to chronic stress, which leads to absenteeism, disengagement, and long term health consequences.

When employees stop speaking, organizations lose access to the truth. And without truth, leadership is making decisions in the dark.

Why This Hits Harder in Small and Midsize Businesses

In smaller organizations, silence echoes louder.

Teams are tighter. Leaders are closer. When someone stops contributing, everyone notices. When trust breaks, it fractures the entire culture.

In small businesses, every voice matters more. Losing even one honest perspective can mean missing critical warning signs, overlooking flawed processes, or alienating customers.

And when employees silence themselves to survive? That survival mode becomes the baseline. Innovation stalls. Problem solving weakens. People do the minimum required to stay safe.

Leadership in these environments cannot afford to treat silence as neutrality. Silence is a symptom of a broken communication culture.

What Healthy Communication Culture Actually Requires

Building a workplace where people speak honestly doesn’t require perfection. It requires intentionality.

Leadership practices that rebuild trust and voice:

Stop punishing honesty—even when feedback feels uncomfortable, thank people for bringing it forward instead of defending, deflecting, or dismissing

Model vulnerability yourself—share what you don’t know, admit mistakes openly, and demonstrate that imperfection doesn’t equal failure

Create structured opportunities for honest conversation—anonymous surveys, regular one on ones, retrospectives, and team check ins where feedback is genuinely welcomed

Respond to feedback with action, not just acknowledgment—employees need to see that speaking up leads to real consideration, even if every suggestion can’t be implemented

Normalize disagreement without retaliation—make it safe to challenge ideas, question decisions, and offer alternative perspectives without fear of punishment

Communication culture is built through consistency, not grand gestures. Employees need to see that honesty is valued more than once before they’ll risk it again.

For leaders navigating communication challenges or supporting employees through difficult workplace dynamics, platforms like Calmerry offer accessible mental health support that can help people process workplace stress and rebuild their capacity to advocate for themselves.

A Truth Worth Facing

If your team has become quiet, pause before assuming apathy.

They may have tried speaking and been ignored.
They may have raised concerns and been punished.
They may be conserving energy just to survive the week.

Silence is not agreement. It’s often grief.

The most powerful thing leadership can do is create enough safety that honesty becomes possible again.

Sometimes that starts with one sentence:

“I want to hear what’s really happening here, even if it’s hard to say.”

Sources:

• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2023

• Harvard Business Review, “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth,” Amy Edmondson, 2019

• Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), “The Cost of Poor Communications,” 2023

• American Psychological Association, “Stress in America: The State of Our Nation,” 2023

This article is part of the 52 Weeks of Mental Health Leadership series from Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions, where we normalize mental health conversations at work and help leaders build more compassionate, sustainable workplaces.

Reflection Question

As a leader, what signals might indicate that your team has stopped speaking honestly, and what would it take for you to make truth-telling safer?

Let’s Continue This Conversation

If you’re navigating communication breakdowns or trying to rebuild trust in your workplace, you’re not alone in facing this challenge. At Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions, we help leaders create cultures where honesty doesn’t require courage because safety is already built in. If you want to explore what open, sustainable communication can look like in your organization, I invite you into a conversation.

Schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation

I’ve been working in technology for more than 45 years.

That’s longer than some of you have been alive. Longer than the internet has been a household word. Long enough to watch innovation cycles come and go, and long enough to see the same pattern repeat itself over and over again.

Every time something “revolutionary” arrives, the people who need it most get left behind.

Not because they’re incapable. Not because they lack curiosity. But because no one slows down long enough to bring them along.

I’m done watching that happen.

Where This Started

I live in rural upstate New York, in a town called Groton. It’s beautiful here. It’s quiet. It’s also the kind of place where people don’t have extra money lying around for professional development, training courses, or the latest tech subscription.

AI education? It doesn’t exist here.

But curiosity does. Questions do. And so does the quiet frustration of feeling like the world is moving forward without you.

I started teaching free AI classes at my local library because I saw that frustration firsthand. Seniors who wanted to understand what their grandkids were talking about. Small business owners who felt overwhelmed. Everyday people who just wanted someone to explain things in plain English without making them feel stupid.

Those classes filled up immediately.

And that’s when I realized this couldn’t just be a local thing.

What I Built, and Why

Learning AI with Gretchen is a free app I built for beginners. Not for engineers. Not for power users. For real people who’ve been quietly intimidated, confused, or shut out of the AI conversation.

It’s designed to be:

· Beginner friendly

· Written in plain language

· Built with guardrails so people feel safe

· Human, not hype driven

Because here’s the truth: most AI tools assume you already speak the language. They assume you know the rules. They assume you know the “right” way to ask questions.

And if you don’t? You’re left feeling behind. Or worse, unsafe.

I’ve spent more than four decades supporting users, building systems, and watching people struggle with technology that wasn’t designed with them in mind. I knew I could do better.

So I did.

Free Forever, Because It Has to Be

The app is free. The classes I teach are free. That’s not changing.

Access to learning should never depend on your income, your age, or your zip code. I built this knowing full well that the people who need it most would never pay for another subscription or workshop fee.

The goal here isn’t profit. It’s access.

As this work grows, I’ll be looking for sponsors who get it. Organizations and people who understand that keeping AI education free for those who need it most isn’t charity. It’s an investment in our communities.

Beyond the Finger Lakes

What started in a library in Groton, New York has now reached learners far beyond my rural community.

I offer free beginner AI classes virtually for anyone outside the Finger Lakes area. Libraries, community groups, small businesses, they can all access the same support without cost barriers.

Because the need is everywhere.

Middle and high schools aren’t teaching AI. Senior centers aren’t touching it. Small business owners are drowning in information but starving for clarity. Rural and underserved communities are being skipped entirely.

Someone had to build a bridge. So I did.

Safety First, Always

A lot of AI tools prioritize speed and capability. I prioritize safety and trust.

Clear explanations. Thoughtful constraints. No dark patterns. No data exploitation.

If you’re new to AI, the experience should feel supportive, not risky. You shouldn’t have to wonder if you’re doing something wrong or if your information is being misused.

You should feel like someone actually thought about you when they built this thing.

Why This Matters to Me

I’m also a mental health advocate and podcast co-host. That perspective matters here.

Feeling left behind by technology creates anxiety, shame, and fear. I’ve watched it happen to people I care about. I’ve heard it in the voices of students in my classes.

This app exists to say something simple but powerful:

You’re not behind. You’re not stupid. You’re right on time.

Technology should work for people, not intimidate them.

No One Gets Left Behind

After 45 years in this industry, I’ve learned that the people building technology rarely slow down to think about who they’re leaving in the dust.

I’m not interested in moving fast and breaking things. I’m interested in making sure no one gets left behind.

Especially now. Especially with AI.

If you’ve felt confused, intimidated, or shut out of this conversation, this app is for you. The classes are for you. This work is for you.

Come learn with me.

Connect with Me

• App: https://learningaiwithgretchen.schosersolutions.com

• Company: Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions

• Website: https://www.schosersolutions.com

• Email: gretchenschoser@schosersolutions.com

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaschoser/

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Every January, the emails flood in.

Revenue targets. Growth projections. Stretch goals layered on top of last year’s impossible expectations.

Leaders everywhere are told: this is the year to go harder, push faster, achieve more.

But here’s what no one is asking: At what cost?

Because buried beneath all those ambitious business plans is a truth leaders rarely name out loud—last year broke people. And this year will finish the job if we don’t change course.

The Unspoken Leadership Trap of New Year Planning

In workplaces, we treat goal setting as if humans are machines that just need better programming.

Hit refresh. Set new targets. Execute.

But that assumption ignores a critical reality:

You cannot build sustainable success on burned-out people.

• If your team barely survived last year, aggressive goals won’t inspire them. They’ll exhaust them.

• If your culture rewards output over wellbeing, your top performers will leave quietly.

• If your leadership celebrates hustle over humanity, trust will erode faster than profits can grow.

The mistake isn’t ambition. The mistake is believing that mental health is separate from performance, instead of the foundation of it.

I Know This Because I Made the Sanest, Scariest Choice of My Life

Last year, I did something that shocked my leadership team.

I quit my corporate job.

Not because I had another offer lined up. Not because I was financially set. Because I was burned out, and I knew that if I didn’t choose myself, no one else would.

I’d spent years as a reliable, high-performing leader. I showed up. I delivered. I made space for others. And when the small consulting firm I worked for was acquired by one of the top five consulting firms, I kept showing up through all the chaos that followed.

But here’s what leadership missed: the acquisition changed everything.

In their focus on integration, growth targets, and proving value to the new parent company, they lost sight of their people. They stopped noticing who was struggling. They stopped asking what was sustainable.

When I told them I was leaving to build my own company, they were genuinely shocked.

And that shock told me everything I needed to know about how disconnected they’d become.

That’s the cost of putting business goals ahead of people.

Leaders don’t just lose employees. They lose the ones who’ve been quietly surviving, hoping someone would notice before they had to choose between their wellbeing and their paycheck.

The Data Shows What Leaders Keep Ignoring

This isn’t just about individual struggle. It’s a systems crisis.

• The Surgeon General’s 2022 Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being confirms that workplace conditions directly impact mental health, and poor mental health costs U.S. employers over $200 billion annually in lost productivity.

• Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace found that 44% of employees report experiencing significant daily stress, with burnout directly tied to unsupportive leadership and unrealistic workload expectations.

• The American Psychological Association’s 2023 Work in America Survey reveals that 77% of workers have experienced work-related stress, and nearly 3 in 5 employees report negative impacts of work-related stress including lack of motivation and decreased effort.

• Harvard Business Review research consistently shows that organizations prioritizing employee wellbeing see higher engagement, retention, and profitability than those focused solely on output metrics.

When leaders set goals without considering mental health impact, people don’t just underperform. They disappear.

Why This Matters More for Small and Midsize Business Leaders

In smaller organizations, leadership decisions are felt immediately.

There’s no corporate buffer. No HR team large enough to absorb the fallout. When a leader sets a pace that’s unsustainable, the entire team feels it within weeks.

That also means small and midsize business leaders have more power to change course quickly.

You don’t need board approval to prioritize mental wellness. You don’t need a new budget line to say out loud that this year, people matter more than projections.

You just need the courage to lead differently.

What Human-Centered Goal Setting Actually Looks Like

This doesn’t mean lowering standards or abandoning ambition.

It means recognizing that the most powerful business strategy you have is a team that can sustain the work.

Leadership practices that build both wellbeing and performance:

• Start planning with capacity, not just capability—ask your team what’s realistic given their actual bandwidth, not what sounds impressive in a deck

• Set mental health goals alongside business goals—make “reduce burnout by 20%” as visible as “increase revenue by 15%”

• Build recovery into workflows, not just deadlines—normalize that rest is part of productivity, not a reward for it

• Measure success by sustainability, not just speed—a goal achieved by breaking your team isn’t success, it’s extraction

• Make mental health resources accessible and normalized, including platforms like Calmerry that provide stigma-free, on-demand support for leaders and teams navigating stress

Healthy success doesn’t mean slower growth. It means growth that doesn’t require your people to sacrifice their humanity.

A Reset Worth Taking

If you’re a leader setting goals this year, I want you to pause and ask yourself something honest:

Would I want to work for me under these expectations?

Not the polished version of you that shows up in strategy meetings. The real you—the one who has bad days, who gets overwhelmed, who sometimes just needs space to breathe.

Because the leaders who build the strongest teams aren’t the ones who push the hardest.

They’re the ones who create cultures where people can be human and still be valued.

This year, your mental health goal is your business goal.

Reflection Question

As you plan for this year, what would change if you measured success by how sustainable your team’s pace is, not just how ambitious your targets are?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Let’s Continue This Conversation

If this resonated with you and you’re ready to explore what human-centered leadership can look like in your organization, I invite you to connect. At Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions, I work with leaders who want to build sustainable, mentally healthy workplaces without sacrificing performance.

Schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation

You can also hear more about my journey and mental health advocacy on the Sh!t That Goes On In Our Heads podcast, where we normalize the conversations leaders need to be having.

Sources:

• U.S. Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being, 2022

• Gallup State of the Global Workplace, 2023

• American Psychological Association Work in America Survey, 2023

• Harvard Business Review, Multiple studies on employee wellbeing and organizational performance, 2022-2023

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