More and more organisations are integrating AI into their HR processes, from recruitment and assessment to exit conversations. It sounds logical, modern, forward-thinking.<\/p>\n
But somewhere it grates. What does it mean to entrust human care and judgement to a system with no body, no voice, no shame?<\/strong><\/p>\n What exactly are we handing over? And what do we prefer to keep out of sight, because it is easier to attribute it to a system than to face it ourselves? AI is often presented as neutral and objective, but is in reality a mirror of the values, assumptions and blind spots of the people and organisations who design and use it. In that mirror we see not only data, but also our own preferences, biases and uncertainties reflected back, often without realising it.<\/p>\n The psychodynamics of technology are rarely named in boardrooms, but they are present there just as much as in any other human relationship. AI is not merely a tool. It is a new carrier of unconscious dynamics. In the language of the Tavistock tradition within organisational psychology: the organisation projects its unresolved tensions onto its structures, and technology becomes a carrier of those projections within that process. What we as humans prefer to avoid, uncertainty, bias, ambivalence, finds its way into the algorithm. Not because AI is malicious, but because we deposit our own discomforts into it.<\/p>\n The paradox is sharp: the more we automate to be objective, the more we sometimes conceal what actually wants to be heard. The wish to be fair and efficient can strip processes of their humanity, and with it the ground on which genuine encounter can take place.<\/p>\n An international tech organisation introduced an AI-driven system for performance review. Managers gave scores, AI formulated the feedback.<\/strong><\/p>\n Efficient, consistent, fair, said the internal announcement. But in the corridors, distance grew. Employees no longer felt seen. Feedback became something the system said, not something a human told them, even though the content on paper was identical to what a manager might have written herself.<\/p>\n One manager chose a different approach. She did not use the AI output as an endpoint, but as a mirror. She asked herself: what do I recognise, or not recognise, in this text? Where does my own sense differ from the outcome? Rather than adopting the judgement, she went into conversation with the employee about the difference between data and experience.<\/p>\n There, in that difference, something new emerged: an encounter. The employee felt genuinely seen. Not despite the technology, but because the manager did not outsource her own judgement, but took accountability for it. This shows that leadership is not about applying systems perfectly, but about being present at the points that do not fit the system, and being willing to put that into words.<\/p>\n Systemically, AI changes not only processes but also relationships. As decisions are increasingly prepared or made by systems, the locus of accountability shifts. Who still feels ownership of a decision once it comes from the system? And what does that do to trust, both among employees and among managers who themselves notice their own judgement carrying gradually less weight?<\/p>\n When AI makes decisions that affect people, there is a risk that human relationships become more functional and distant.<\/strong><\/p>\n Not because people want that, but because the system shapes the form of contact. That can lead to a loss of relational depth, where conversations become more transactional and less personal. It can lead to a displacement of accountability, where decisions are attributed to the technology and ownership fades. And it can lead to the reinforcement of existing inequalities, where biases in data are reproduced unnoticed, at a scale no individual assessor could ever reach. The system then operates not only within the organisation, but on the organisation. It changes how people relate to one another.<\/p>\n From a psychological perspective, AI offers leaders and HR professionals a form of reassurance. The system gives the illusion of objectivity and makes difficult conversations feel safer by reducing the personal charge. But that charge can be exactly what makes interaction meaningful. Delegating difficult decisions to technology can also be a defence mechanism. If a message does not land well, accountability can be shifted: that is simply what the system says. That protects the sender, but leaves the recipient feeling that no genuine connection or dialogue is possible.<\/p>\n The question, then, is not only what AI can do, but mainly what we want to do with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n AI can be a powerful tool for efficiency, but leadership requires more than efficiency. It requires presence, courage and the capacity not to avoid discomfort. Presence means engaging in conversation yourself, even when it feels tense. It means seeing technology as a tool, not a substitute for judgement or empathy. And it means making explicit which values are leading in decisions, rather than letting those values be implicitly determined by whatever a system happens to produce.<\/p>\n In a time when systems increasingly take over from us, choosing closeness can be an act of leadership, perhaps the most important one there is.<\/p>\n Which parts of yourself do you entrust to technology? And what happens to your leadership when you outsource your judgement, your timing, your intuition? Perhaps this moment does not call for better algorithms, but for more presence, precisely at the points where it becomes uncomfortable. AI can do a great deal, but it cannot bring the warmth, nuance and courage that make human contact valuable. That remains our domain, and perhaps that is our most important responsibility.<\/p>\n Notes for those who wish to read further:<\/em><\/p>\n The system gives the illusion of objectivity and makes difficult conversations feel safer by reducing the personal charge. But that charge can be exactly what makes interaction meaningful.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":932,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[89],"class_list":["post-5028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5114,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5028\/revisions\/5114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n