Your team's AI anxiety is rising. Handled well, it becomes their creativity.

You can feel it before anyone says it. A slight held breath in the team when AI comes up. The capable person who has gone quiet in meetings. The over-bright joke about being replaced that lands a little too flat. Nobody has raised a hand to say they are worried. They do not need to. It is in the room, and as their leader you are carrying the question of what to do with it.

Here is the reframe that changes everything about that moment. The anxiety is not the problem to be managed away. It is energy, and energy can be pointed. Left alone it curdles into fear and freezing. Met well, the very same charge becomes curiosity and invention. Which way it goes is mostly decided by you, not by the person feeling it.

How real is AI anxiety at work?

Real enough to show up clearly in the numbers, and rising. Mercer, a large workforce consultancy, surveyed 12,000 employees and leaders for its 2026 Global Talent Trends report. The share of employees who fear losing their job to AI rose from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026. Over the same period, the share who say they are thriving at work fell from 66% to 44%. That is a steep drop in two years, and AI is a big part of the story.

There is a gap underneath those figures that matters more than either. In the same research, 62% of employees feel their leaders underestimate the emotional and psychological weight of AI. So the anxiety is not only present. It is largely unseen from the top, which is exactly how a quiet drag on a team goes unaddressed. It is a close cousin of the way AI efforts stall when the human side is left out.

Why does the same anxiety help one team and hurt another?

Because the feeling is not the whole story. What a person does with it depends heavily on the setting around them. Research on AI anxiety and creativity points to two levers in particular: the social norms of the team, and visible commitment from management. Where those are supportive, people cope in adaptive ways. They experiment, ask, and stretch. Where they are absent, the same anxiety turns protective, and people narrow, hide, and hold still.

Think of it as pressure on a person. Pressure with support becomes focus. Pressure without support becomes strain. Same force, opposite result, and the difference is the environment. This is the quiet truth most AI rollouts miss: they treat anxiety as a personal weakness to push through, when it is a signal to lead into. Meet it well and you get the outcome every leader says they want, a team that grows into the technology instead of bracing against it.

So what does a leader actually do with it?

You stop asking how to reassure people that nothing will change, which they do not believe, and start asking how to make it safe to move while things do change. That is the question that turns anxious energy into creative energy. Work it in this order:

1. Name it out loud, once and plainly. Say plainly that AI is changing the work and that unease is a normal response. Naming a feeling in the room takes most of its grip away.
2. Set the norm that experimenting is welcome. Make trying AI, and saying what did not work, the expected thing rather than a risk. People follow what is safe, not what is announced.
3. Show your own commitment. Use the tools yourself, visibly, and back the time to learn them. Commitment that people can see does more than any policy.
4. Point the anxiety at a real problem. Give the team a concrete thing to improve with AI. Energy with a target becomes work; energy without one becomes worry.
5. Support the person, not just the rollout. Notice who has gone quiet, and reach for them as a human. The care is the intervention.

What could this look like when you get it right?

Picture the same team six months on. AI still changes the work every quarter, but the held breath is gone. People bring you what they have tried, including the things that failed, because that is safe now. The person who went quiet is running a small experiment of their own. The anxiety did not vanish; you gave it somewhere to go, and it turned into momentum. That is a team that has truly grown into AI, rather than one merely issued with it.

This is the part worth holding onto. The feeling your team is carrying is not a liability to suppress. It is a sign they care about their work and their place in it, and that is precisely the raw material of creativity. Meet it with honesty and support, and you get more than calm. You get a team that meets a hard, fast-changing moment with invention. That capacity to help people grow through change is the most human part of leading, and it is where your advantage now lies.

About the author

Thomas Green

British technology futurist, AI keynote speaker and advisor. Thirty years across enterprise technology and AI strategy, helping leaders navigate the future of work. The futurist who died.