When Change Takes Two Years Instead of 80, Leaders Become the Shock Absorbers

On October 4, 2026, 60 Minutes asked whether AI is just the latest workplace revolution or something different.

When economists describe the Industrial Revolution, they describe a transformation that unfolded across generations. Painful as it often was, workers, communities and institutions had time to catch up.

Daron Acemoglu believes we do not have that time now. On the program, the Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist, who studies how technology affects work, said the first phase of the Industrial Revolution played out over about 80 years. The AI transformation, he said, is happening in one or two years, and across many sectors at once. In his worst case, if we stay on our current course and do nothing, unemployment could triple within a decade.

He was just as clear that the outcome is not fixed. He argued for AI designed to make people better rather than expendable, and for policies such as a tax code that encourages hiring people. And he made a point leaders should take personally: because the future is so uncertain, it is all the more subject to our choices.

I wrote about the segment's broader lessons in AI Can Learn Your Expertise. It Can't Learn Who You Are. Here I want to focus on the speed, because speed changes what leadership has to do.

Individuals Can't Absorb This Pace Alone

When change is slow, people adapt on their own. They see the shift coming, take a class, change jobs and rebuild over years. When change arrives in months, that natural adaptation breaks down. Skills age faster than people can replace them. Roles change before anyone has redesigned the training for the new version.

Acemoglu also rejected the idea that new AI training jobs will catch everyone who is displaced. The number of people doing that work, he said, is small compared with the number automation will replace. That puts even more weight on what employers do inside their own walls.

In that environment, leaders become the shock absorbers. The choices they make about how fast to automate, how to redesign roles and where to invest in people decide whether the pace feels like opportunity or whiplash to the people inside their organizations.

Few leaders asked for that responsibility. The moment has handed it to them anyway.

The Choices That Set the Pace

Choose augmentation first. Acemoglu's call for AI that makes people better works as a design principle inside every company, every time a tool is deployed. For each AI project, ask whether it is built to make your people more capable or simply to need fewer of them. Both may happen, but the first should lead.

Match the speed of adoption with the speed of development. If a tool can change a workflow in a quarter, the plan to develop the people in that workflow should move on the same timeline. Training that arrives a year after the change is not support. It is an apology.

Decide what human work you will protect, and say so. Every organization has work where trust, relationships and judgment are the product. Name it, invest in it, and make clear to your people and your customers that you are choosing to keep humans at the center there, and why. Put it in writing, in the same planning documents where you track automation targets, so it carries equal weight in the decisions.

Waiting Is a Choice Too

Speed creates a temptation to wait. When the picture keeps shifting, holding off feels prudent. At this pace, though, waiting rarely keeps options open. More often it lets others set the direction for you.

As I wrote in Waiting for AI Certainty Is the Real Risk, the leaders who move well in this period will act on what they believe about their people before the outcome is clear. Moving with conviction here is different from moving recklessly. It means deciding what kind of organization you want to be on the other side of this transition, and starting to build it now.

Acemoglu noted that every technological revolution brings pushback. Some of it is resistance to progress. Much of it is a reasonable response from people who were never given a fair chance to adapt. Leaders can reduce that pushback by giving people that chance, early and visibly.

The Window Is Short

The economist's warning is sobering, and it should be. Tripled unemployment would be a crisis for families and communities, not just for markets. Yet he ended on agency rather than despair. The more uncertain the future, the more it depends on what we decide.

For most leaders, that means one practical step this month: sit down with your team, map where AI is already changing the work, and agree together on what you will build next.

No leader controls the pace of AI. Every leader controls how their people meet it. That is where the next few years will be won or lost, one decision at a time.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.