A friend of mine runs a scale-up. The company has just raised a sizeable amount of money. If you have been a struggling startup, this is a moment of triumph. It is the validation you have been desperate for, the thing that will bring about real momentum and, more importantly, that sense of the future opening up. But then comes the hangover. Capital brings pressure with it. Expectations harden. Time shrinks. Questions that once floated around the edges start sitting in the middle of the table. What are we really building here? What kind of company are we becoming? What happens to people as the machinery of the company gets bigger and faster?

When we spoke, a lot came up. Meaning. Purpose. AI. Fear. What leaders owe the people doing the work. At first these can sound like separate conversations, but I do not think they are. I think they are all part of the same one. As a company scales, one of the real risks is that people lose sight of where the meaning of their work actually lives. Once that happens, everything else begins to fray.

In many companies right now, leaders are trying to get engineers to make fuller use of AI. The shallow reading is that engineers are resisting change, clinging to old habits, or failing to move with the times. That may be true in some cases, but it misses the more human reality of what is going on. For many engineers, coding is not just a task on a board. It is a craft. It is one of the few places in modern work where a person can still feel absorbed, capable, elegant and exact. There is pleasure in it, but there is also dignity. A person feels their mind working properly. They feel useful. They feel that years of effort have turned into fluency, into flow.

So when AI enters the workflow, what gets disturbed is not only process. Identity gets a shake-up. A person starts wondering where they now stand in relation to their own work. They wonder what exactly is left for them to do, whether the thing they spent years learning is still valued, and whether they are being slowly trained out of their own vocation. These are the real questions. The uncomfortable ones. The ones that were once around the edges but are now starting to move front and centre.

All of this is happening in a season of layoffs, restructures and unease. People are not responding to AI in a vacuum. They are responding to it in a climate where they can already feel the floor shifting under their feet. They are told that AI will augment them, support them and free them up for higher-order work. At the same time, they can see what is happening around them. Teams are being reduced. Roles are being folded together. Whole categories of work are being spoken about in the language of efficiency. Human beings are very good at picking up a double message. They can hear the official line and the unofficial one at the same time.

So when leaders say, use AI, many workers hear another question underneath it. They wonder whether they are being asked to work differently or whether the company is preparing to need less of them. That fear is not always paranoia. Sometimes it is simple pattern recognition. This is why the conversation cannot be merely technical.

It is moral.

If the message is, use AI because productivity matters more than your craft, it will fail. And it should fail. It insults the thing that gives many people dignity in their work. It treats the worker as a unit of output rather than a person in a relationship with their vocation, sometimes their calling. That is a sacred relationship. The better conversation is more demanding and more honest.

The meaning of your work was never in manually typing every line of code.

It was in judgment.

In discernment.

In taste.

In knowing what should be built and what should not.

In deciding what is elegant, what is safe, what is sloppy, what is humane, what can be trusted.

AI can generate code. It cannot bear responsibility. That part still belongs to us.

This is where I keep coming back to the distinction between happiness and meaning. Happiness is about what feels good in the moment. Meaning asks something else. Does this matter? Is this worth giving myself to? What does this moment require of me? Meaning can involve discomfort. It can involve growth. It can involve giving up a familiar way of working. It can even involve grief. If a craft you love is changing, you are allowed to feel that. There is no wisdom in pretending otherwise.

But there is also no wisdom in confusing a preferred process with a meaningful purpose. That is the mistake a lot of us are in danger of making. We start to imagine that the meaning of our work lies in the manual labour itself, in doing every part by hand, in preserving the exact process through which we first came to feel competent and alive. Sometimes that is true, but often it is not.

The meaning of an engineer’s work was never simply in typing every line of code by hand. It lived in judgment. In knowing what should be built and what should not. In understanding trade-offs, protecting quality, and solving the right problem well. It lived in building something sound enough that another human being could rely on it.

AI can help with syntax and speed up parts of the process. What it cannot do is bear responsibility. It cannot decide what corners must never be cut, what is worth building, or what kind of standard should govern the work. That remains human terrain, and that is where the real conversation begins.

The phrase that stayed with me after our conversation was this one: we are not asking people to abandon the art. We are asking them to relocate it. I think that is exactly right. The art may no longer live where it once did. It may not live in producing every line yourself. It may now live more in framing the problem, interrogating the output, spotting the bad assumption, shaping the system, protecting the standard, and asking the harder question that the machine cannot ask.

That is still craft. It may even be a deeper form of craft. But it feels different, and leaders should be honest about that. People know when something important is changing. They do not need slogans. They need language that respects the loss and points to the next source of dignity. They need to feel that what they have spent years developing is not being mocked or brushed aside in the rush toward efficiency.

A lot of leadership language falls apart right here. Leaders want adoption. They want faster workflows. They want more leverage from the team. So they reach for the productivity argument. They talk about speed, efficiency and the inevitability of change. None of that is false, but in the mouth of a leader it can feel painfully incomplete. If the underlying message is that the craft matters less than the output, people will resist. If the message is that AI is here to help but you yourself are replaceable, trust will collapse. If leaders speak about purpose in one meeting and treat people like financial variables in the next, nobody will believe a word they say.

People can cope with difficult truths. What they struggle to forgive is being treated like fools. They know when the language of innovation is being used to conceal a thinner, colder view of the human being. They know when they are being asked to embrace change in good faith while the institution reserves the right to treat them as disposable.

No company can promise perfect safety. Markets change, technologies change, and some jobs do disappear. Adults know this. But leadership still has obligations. One of them is to remember that there is a human being behind the role. A person with a craft, a biography, a sense of pride, a mortgage, a family, and a private fear about becoming obsolete. If you cannot see that person, you should not be talking about meaning.

There is something morally cheap about asking workers to embrace radical change while also signalling that they may be discarded the moment the numbers turn. That is not leadership. It is opportunism. Respect does not mean freezing the company in place. It means speaking plainly. It means making hard decisions with gravity. It means refusing to treat human beings as disposable levers. It means understanding that trust, once broken here, is very hard to restore.

I suspect that for many companies, this is the real test now. The test is not whether they can buy the best tools, accelerate output, or impress investors with a compelling AI story. The deeper question is whether they can help people find meaning again as the work changes. That requires something from workers. It asks them not to cling sentimentally to every old process. It asks them to grow, to adapt, and to bring their judgment to a new landscape.

It also requires something from leaders. It asks them to tell the truth, to respect the craft, to respect the person, and to make room for fear without becoming ruled by it. It asks them to ensure that the adoption of new tools does not become an excuse for a colder, meaner view of human beings. Once a company starts treating people as costs in waiting, everything else begins to rot. Trust goes first. Meaning soon follows. After that, the culture may still look intact for a while, but something essential has already started to leave.

I do not think AI has to empty work of meaning. But it will expose very quickly where the meaning was sitting all along. If meaning sat only in the manual act, then yes, AI will feel like theft. If meaning sat in the quality of one’s contribution, in one’s judgment, in one’s care, and in one’s willingness to answer the real needs of the moment, then the work is changing but it is not disappearing. The centre of gravity is moving.

That movement will be unsettling. For some people it will feel like liberation. For others it will feel like loss. Most of us, if we are honest, will feel some mixture of both. The companies that handle this well will not be the ones that force the change fastest. They will be the ones that can relocate meaning without humiliating the people who are being asked to move. That is harder than rolling out a tool, but it is also the real work.

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week.

A quick note about the workshop:

If the above essay stirred something in you, that’s very close to what my upcoming workshop is about.

On Saturday 28 March (11am–3pm) at Sanders Place, Richmond, I’m hosting a small in-person workshop called Finding Meaning in Work (capped at 15).

What we’ll actually do in the room:

It’s reflective, not career advice. No jargon, no hustle culture, and you won’t be put on the spot. Sharing is optional.

If you’d like to join, you can book below. Use DBN2026 at checkout.

On the fence? Reply with a sentence about your situation and I’ll tell you honestly if it’s a fit.