Our AI Odyssey: Navigating the "Crisis of Agency"

Watching The Odyssey (highly recommended, though I think Hugh Jackman would have been the better choice for the lead role), it occurred to me how much of a metaphor it is for our AI experience. Homer’s story is, at its core, a quest for reclaiming personal agency. Odysseus spends years at the mercy of forces beyond his control—gods, monsters, storms and the whims of others – seeking to reclaim agency in his long and winding journey home. As algorithms increasingly decide what we see, recommend what we should do, generate what we read and, in some cases, make decisions on our behalf, we experience a similar sense of “dislocation” and risk becoming passengers in systems whose logic we neither control nor fully understand.

The following basic premise is a consistent through-line in our AIX articles and podcasts: AI is transforming work, but it’s also creating confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety. Everyone at all levels of the organization is asking: “Will I still have a job in a year?” “What impact will this have on my career?” The only certainty is that AI will eliminate and/or permanently redefine some jobs and create new ones.

The best – perhaps only – answer to this burning question is to provide each person with the support and tools they need to develop the skills that make them hard to replace: critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, adaptability, and leadership. By intentionally adapting and amplifying these skills for an AI-augmented workplace—where machines handle more routine work—your people transform anxiety into purpose, reclaim agency, and take charge of their future.

This is still a foundational premise, but may be too glib by half - a thought that occurred to me as I was listening to a recent podcast with Atlantic tech writer Charlie Warzel, who spoke about the “crisis of agency,” based on an article he wrote this past May titled, “The Feeling of Control Slipping Away: AI is causing a crisis of agency.”

Warzel’s overarching message is as follows: the velocity and scale of AI tools cause widespread malaise, hostility toward the tech industry, and heightened paranoia regarding automated manipulation, fake accounts, and stealth marketing. This environment blurs the distinction between human and artificial creativity, heightening feelings that human control over online experience is slipping away. I urge you to read the article in its entirety, but here are the nut grafs:

When you start looking, you see the anxiety over agency everywhere. You see it in the reactions to the mass layoffs at places such as Meta in preparation for an AI transformation, in the coverage of venture-capital-funded, bulk-content-creation bot-army start-ups that proudly claim, “Never pay a human again.”

Or when you read reports that medical journals are filling with made-up citations, or a study that suggests that chatbot use is degrading our thinking, or an announcement from Google that it will offer an alternative to its link-based search results: AI agents that can scan the web on your behalf and either bring back a canonical answer or send you personalized alerts.

AI is driving people insane in all kinds of ways:

Its overwhelming speed and existential stakes have given rise to generalized malaise and hostility directed at the industry, to say nothing of actual cases of AI psychosis. But a lot of this is subtler—a deepening of the bewildering, corrosive feeling…

People who don’t feel empowered by all of this are unmoored. Across so many levels of culture, there’s a feeling of control slipping ever so slightly away. You, me, all of us, whether or not we enjoy or use these tools, are living through a crisis of agency. The agita and paranoia, even the excitement—over AI’s encroachment on work, education, art, and culture—is the by-product of a cultural and technological moment in which humans are sliding into a more passive role in many activities. One way to look at the generative-AI boom is as a massive societal experiment foisted on us by Silicon Valley, the animating question of which is: What is a human for?

He closes with this:

The AI industry has ushered in an era of offshoring that’s as irresistible to some people as it is disorienting to others. What’s at stake is not just truth or trust, but also a sense of direction, orientation, and purpose for all of us.

Perhaps that is why The Odyssey feels like such an apt metaphor for this moment. Odysseus is not given a map home - he’s thrown into a world of forces he cannot control. The challenge is not simply to survive but to remain himself long enough to find his way back. We are still in medias res—in the middle of our own journey, navigating an AI-augmented world whose contours are only beginning to emerge. The “crisis of agency” stems, in part, from not knowing whether we are still steering or merely being carried along…anxiety that’s compounded by not having a clear idea of what to do about it. Yes, we need to become more adaptable, more productive, or harder to replace by leaning into what we do best, and refusing to outsource our judgment, our curiosity, our relationships, our capacity to create, and ultimately our ability to choose what kind of humans we want to be. The harder question is…how?

Odysseus’s destination was Ithaca. Ours may be something less tangible but no less essential: a place where, amid all the machines and intelligence we have created, we remain recognizably human, and are able to independently assert/express those essential qualities. I am not offering any prescriptions, just a diagnosis by way of comparative literary analysis. Where are you in your personal AI odyssey?

HR Practitioners as Builders: The Benefits and Risks of Vibe Coding for HR. This session will show HR professionals how “vibe coding”—rapidly building working tools and prototypes by describing intent in natural language to AI coding assistants—delivers hands-on experience that demystifies and unlocks AI’s real power. Participants will see where this approach accelerates HR work (quick automations, internal tools, data explorations) and where it should be avoided (high-stakes decisions, regulated processes, production systems without oversight).

Featured Presenter: Hernan Chiosso, CSPO, SPHR. For 25+ years, Hernan has moved between HR leadership and technology roles—building software and leading people teams, bridging product strategy and organizational development.

When: Thursday, August 27, 2026. Register here.

(This Program has been pre-approved for 0.5 HR Credit toward aPHR®, aPHRi™, PHR®, PHRca®, SPHR®, GPHR®, PHRi™ and SPHRi™ recertification through HR Certification Institute®.) AI4HR Live! is a virtual series produced by HR.com that showcases practical AI adoption strategies.

Offbeat tales of AI being unintentionally funny (i.e., woefully wrong), bizarre, creepy, (amusingly) scary, and/or just plain scary.

This is not exactly a fit for this category, but it’s a provocative conversation that I wanted to bring to your attention: Robert Wright joins Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, to talk about his fascinating new book, The God Test (highly recommended), and how mankind has come to a major crossroads with the development of artificial intelligence. They discuss several issues, including whether AIs can have intentionality, sentience, and what that would imply for our understanding of humanity.

The week’s most interesting and timely articles on AI and its impacts on employee wellbeing and readiness.

The Strengths Gap Fueling AI Burnout at Work. A survey of more than 800 Australian workers found that regular AI users reported higher self-doubt (53% vs. 37% for rare users), lower strengths use (38% vs. 60%), and elevated burnout risk (49% vs. 32%). Passive AI use (e.g., copy-pasting outputs) reduced ownership, confidence, and work meaning, while active collaboration helped preserve engagement.
Source: Psychology Today

Work AI Index 2026: Botsitting, Botshitting & the Hidden Human Labor of AI at Work. Survey of 6,000 digital workers (US, UK, Australia) showed 87% use AI and report ~11 hours/week saved, yet only 13% say organizations perform significantly better. Workers spend 6.4 hours/week on “botsitting” (context-feeding, supervising, debugging); those in low-context environments feel more worn out by AI, with higher job-hunting intent and fatigue. Source: Glean Work AI Institute

Report: Workers Are Ready for AI. Organizations Aren’t. Global surveys of leaders and workers found 85% of workers expect AI to improve their jobs over the next two years (even amid expected employment declines), with 87% reporting productivity gains and 57% higher job satisfaction. Organizations lag in skills, strategy linkage, training, and support, creating readiness gaps. Source: The Conference Board

The great AI regret is a warning sign for HR leaders. Adaptavist survey of 2,500 knowledge workers found two-thirds feel nostalgic for pre-AI work; 38% would remove generative AI entirely. Nearly half said low-quality “AI slop” makes jobs more repetitive and less meaningful; 37% reported lower engagement; 42% spend more time verifying AI output than they save. Source: HR Executive

Workers say AI promised a productivity boost, but left them missing pre-AI office life. Coverage of Adaptavist research showed nearly two-thirds of office workers miss pre-AI work; over one-third would remove GenAI. Workers reported more frustration, repetitive tasks, reduced meaning, project slowdowns from poor AI output, and 54% worry about role risks within five years, affecting morale.
Source: Yahoo / The Cool Down (reporting on Adaptavist)

Over half of American employees have used AI to take workplace training, according to new data. Moodle-linked data found 52% of US employees use AI to complete mandatory training (including full completion by 12%). Two-thirds experience burnout (higher among younger workers), driven by workload, lack of resources, economic pressures, and AI role concerns; Gen Z shows higher replacement fears but greater openness to AI tools. Source: The American Institute of Stress

3 AI Workplace Research Studies Every Leader Should Know This Week. Summarizes BCG (time savings but little guidance on reinvesting it), Employment Hero (“AI Paradox”: many feel like they are “cheating,” and AI creates more checking work), and Glean/Work AI Institute findings on botsitting (hours lost supervising AI). Highlights direction gaps, aversion, and hidden labor burdens. Source: Forbes

Learning for the Future: Preparing Organizations and Workers for AI Disruption
Conference Board analysis stresses that workers lack confidence in company resources and training for AI-driven role changes; limited learning opportunities during work hours create significant readiness risks as AI disrupts tasks and jobs.
Source: The Conference Board

Developed in partnership with HR.com, AIX is a multimedia knowledge and engagement platform for experts, leaders, and HR peers to exchange experiences and seek guidance on cultivating mentally resilient, emotionally intelligent, and professionally adaptable workforces in an AI-augmented world. AI will increasingly touch every corner of the employee experience—from hiring to training, from task management to team dynamics. Whether its impact is positive or harmful depends largely on how HR prepares for it. The AIX platform (The AIX Files, The AIX Factor podcast, and the AIXonHR.com community) will play an important role in promoting employee well-being, workplace culture, and organisational readiness, the critical success factors in the age of AI.