{"id":2720,"date":"2026-03-18T16:05:54","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T16:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/03\/18\/i-run-the-worlds-largest-employee-mental-health-company-leaders-are-treating-ai-adoption-as-a-tech-problem-its-not-fortune\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T16:05:54","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T16:05:54","slug":"i-run-the-worlds-largest-employee-mental-health-company-leaders-are-treating-ai-adoption-as-a-tech-problem-its-not-fortune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/03\/18\/i-run-the-worlds-largest-employee-mental-health-company-leaders-are-treating-ai-adoption-as-a-tech-problem-its-not-fortune\/","title":{"rendered":"I run the world's largest employee mental health company. Leaders are treating AI adoption as a tech problem. It's not – Fortune"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Posey is the CEO of ComPsych, the largest global provider of employee mental health and absence management services.<\/em>
As CEO of ComPsych \u2014 the world\u2019s largest provider of employee mental health services \u2014 I spend a lot of time thinking about what\u2019s making workers anxious. Right now, AI is at the top of that list.
According to a 2025 Pew Research Center report, workers are more worried than hopeful about AI in the workplace. And the consequences of that anxiety go well beyond morale: research shows that when employees believe they are likely to lose their job, the risk of serious psychological distress rises considerably \u2014 along with the likelihood of mental health leave, disengagement, and burnout. Leaders are rolling out AI tools at speed. Most are treating this as a technology challenge. It isn\u2019t. It\u2019s a people challenge \u2014 and getting it wrong has a measurable cost.
Job insecurity driven by AI fear manifests in two damaging patterns. The first is disengagement \u2014 distracted, uncollaborative workers doing the minimum to get by. The second is its opposite: workers who over-compensate by becoming hypersensitive and over-extended, eventually burning out. Both patterns hurt team performance. Both are symptoms of the same underlying failure: leaders who haven\u2019t addressed what their employees are actually afraid of.
To counteract this, leaders need to focus on building genuine trust. Trust doesn\u2019t just happen \u2014 it\u2019s earned. The most effective way to build it is through early, open, and consistent communication. The impulse to wait until everything is figured out before communicating is understandable. But in the absence of communication, rumors form, narratives harden, and fear sets in. Sharing relevant information as soon as it\u2019s available \u2014 being transparent about what\u2019s still being determined and when more details will follow \u2014 allows leaders to inform and reassure simultaneously.
In the case of AI, this can be as simple as defining a clear company philosophy. Articulating that AI may change parts of a person\u2019s job but does not diminish their value gives leaders the opportunity to set the tone, reduce fear, and support emotional well-being before anxiety takes hold.
Clarity about where AI should \u2014 and shouldn\u2019t \u2014 have the final word is one of the most important things a leader can establish early.
I remind our teams constantly: AI has to earn our trust. If you were collaborating with a new colleague for the first time \u2014 one with only a few years of real-world experience \u2014 you would never take their work, assume it was fully correct, and move forward without carefully reviewing it, providing feedback, or challenging the portions you disagreed with. The same scrutiny applies to anything produced with AI assistance.
Beyond quality checks, there are categories of work where human judgment, ingenuity, and creativity must remain the final word. Every organization will need to define its own guardrails. As a company providing mental health services to millions of people worldwide, we\u2019ve been explicit with our teams: the human expertise of our clinicians is paramount. We are embracing AI to enhance operations and aid patient navigation \u2014 but we will never defer to a large language model when someone is in crisis and needs human-centered care.
Setting clear expectations is necessary but not sufficient \u2014 organizations must also actively ensure their employees are growing alongside the technology, not being hollowed out by it. Research from MIT\u2019s Media Lab found that heavy reliance on AI tools can atrophy the independent thinking and problem-solving skills people need most.
It is incumbent on leaders to ensure teams are using these tools to vault their creative and strategic thinking to new heights \u2014 not as crutches they eventually won\u2019t be able to function without. This means actively encouraging imaginative, out-of-the-box thinking, reinforcing the value of individual skills, and investing in continuous learning and development programs. Upskilling is not optional: the skills needed to thrive alongside AI, and the tasks that make up our workdays, will change enormously.
The leaders who get this right won\u2019t just be the ones who deploy AI fastest. They\u2019ll be the ones who brought their people along \u2014 reducing fear, building trust, and preserving the human judgment that no model can replicate. The goal isn\u2019t to help your workforce adapt to the future of work. It\u2019s to help them build it.
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Paul Posey is the CEO of ComPsych, the largest global provider of employee mental health and absence management services.As CEO of ComPsych \u2014 the world\u2019s largest provider of employee mental health services \u2014 I spend a lot of time thinking about what\u2019s making workers anxious. Right now, AI is at the top of that list. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2721,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2720","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}