A few months ago, I sat across from a CEO who was genuinely proud. He had just implemented an AI-powered people analytics platform: real-time sentiment data, predictive turnover scores, and engagement dashboards. Beautiful system. His HR team had been cut by a third. “It does what they used to do,” he told me.
Six months later, two of his highest-performing senior managers quit in the same quarter. No flags. No warning scores. Nothing on the dashboard. Just two people who had felt, for a long time, that no one knew them, who had finally stopped waiting for that to change.
The cost? One was a team lead carrying $4 million in client relationships. The other had spent two years grooming junior talent. Between severance, recruiting, onboarding, and the business that walked out with them, the company spent close to $600,000 replacing people the dashboard said were fine.
The system wasn’t wrong about what it measured. It just couldn’t measure what mattered most.
The work nobody can see
Sociologist Allison Pugh spent years studying the people we trust with our most human moments: physicians, teachers, chaplains, therapists. The concept at its core may be the most important thing your organization has never heard of. Her book The Last Human Job argues that the only irreplaceable work humans will do in an AI-saturated future is relational: empathy, attunement, and genuine presence. She calls this work “connective labor.”
Connective labor is the work of truly seeing another person.
Not managing them. Not assessing them. Seeing them.
It’s the check-in that surfaces a struggling employee before they spiral into a quiet quit. The honest conversation that defuses conflict before it splits a team. The leader who notices, without a dashboard or a survey prompt, that something is off with someone she’s known for three years. Connective labor is invisible. It is relational. And it is load-bearing.
Pugh’s research focuses on professions we’ve always associated with that kind of care. She doesn’t spend much time in middle management. But that’s exactly where connective labor quietly holds organizations together, and where it is now under the most pressure I’ve seen in 35 years of work.
What AI is doing to your people leaders
AI is automating the transactional scaffolding of the manager’s job. Scheduling. Reporting. Coordination. Performance tracking. And what’s left after the automation strips away the legible, measurable, delegatable work is connective labor. The hardest part. The most invisible part. The part almost no organization knows how to name, measure, or invest in.
I use the term people leader deliberately, because a manager undersells what this role requires. People leaders are the ones who create the conditions that make work sustainable: safety, belonging, challenge, and connection to something that matters. These aren’t soft aspirations. They are operational requirements. When they’re absent, performance erodes, turnover climbs, and conflict festers quietly until it doesn’t.
This cannot be automated. Seeing a person requires being seen in return. It is a two-way act. A sentiment algorithm can detect the signal that something is wrong. It cannot sit across the table from someone and help them figure out what it is, what they need, and whether there’s still a reason to stay. AI cannot inspire a person to grow when growth is hard. It cannot disagree kindly in a way that exposes a blind spot and forces honesty. AI does not care about our specific thriving, and it is very good at agreeing with us.
These actions are a people leader’s job. And we are systematically making it impossible to do.
Why it keeps disappearing
Connective labor gets devalued because it’s hard to see. It doesn’t produce a deliverable. When a people leader spends 40 minutes on an unplanned conversation with someone who’s struggling, nothing is logged for that effort. When she notices someone has gone quiet in meetings and makes a point of checking in, the outcome (trust rebuilt, a problem caught early, a person who feels less alone) has no line item.
So organizations stop investing in it. They cut the slack that made it possible, stack more reporting, cascade more tools, and shrink people leaders’ real attention while expanding their official headcount.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2022 advisory named loneliness a public health crisis and pointed directly to the workplace as one of the primary places adults seek connection. That report landed a few years ago. Most organizations responded with another survey.
And then they wonder why their best people keep leaving.
Most organizations don’t have an engagement problem. They have a connective labor deficit. They’ve automated around the thing that holds people together, and nobody’s named it yet.
What this costs
A manufacturing client of mine was proud of their lean management structure. Each people leader carried about eighteen direct reports, a robust HR system, weekly automated check-in prompts, and a quarterly pulse survey.
What they didn’t have was time. Their people leaders were spending roughly twelve minutes per week per person. The relationships were cordial. Functional. Shallow. When I interviewed the team, one word kept coming up in different forms: invisible. Replaceable. Fine.
Fine is the most dangerous word in an organization. Fine means nothing is on fire. It also means nothing is being tended to.
When two competitors started recruiting, they lost seven people in eight weeks. Smart, experienced, high-performing people who decided that feeling genuinely known somewhere else was worth a lateral move. Their people leaders weren’t failing. They were structurally prevented from doing the work that might have kept those people. The connective labor had been engineered out of the system. Nobody meant for that to happen. It happened anyway.
What fit-for-human organizations do differently
This is not an argument against AI. I am not nostalgic for inefficiency. I want organizations to use every tool available to free up human capacity. That’s exactly the question: free it up for what?
If the hours saved by automation get absorbed by more reporting and more throughput, you haven’t gained anything. You’ve made the transactional parts of the job faster while leaving the relational parts exactly as starved as before.
Organizations that are fit for human life do three things differently. They name connective labor explicitly and treat it as a business-critical function. They protect the conditions for it—people leaders need unscheduled margin; the kind of space that lets a real conversation happen. And they make it visible in how they evaluate and develop their people. If connective labor never shows up in how you recognize the people who do it well, you are actively selecting against it. You will get what you measure.
Pugh’s research was never really only about physicians and chaplains. It was about what it costs, to both parties, when someone is seen versus processed. AI will not save your culture. The people leader who knows her people will.
Let’s make sure she still has time to do the work that only she can do.