If you worked on Henry Ford’s car assembly lines a century ago, his company inspectors could visit your home without warning to check the house was clean and your kids were going to school.
As the Depression took hold, you had to watch what you said in case it was overheard by spies that Ford’s private police force planted throughout the workforce to spot any hint of strikes or communist activity.
You knew the gun-toting head of that force imposed company rules so ruthlessly that, as historians would write, a ban on sitting down while on the factory floor meant that even if you got injured, staff doctors were expected to treat you while you stood, unless you had a wound that specifically involved a leg.
Ford’s goals to control his workforce were not uncommon in big industrial US cities back then, even if his methods were more intense. Yet his actions seem unimaginable today, which raises a question: how will future historians look back on today’s corporate leaders?
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What are today’s big names in business doing that will dismay future generations?
The obvious contender is the way executives handle the boom in artificial intelligence and the associated drive for remorseless organisational change.
Some glimpses have begun to emerge.
Last month, Standard Chartered boss Bill Winters sparked disbelief by suggesting AI would replace “lower-value human capital” at the bank, where sweeping job cuts are planned over the next four years.
Winters quickly apologised, insisting he valued all his colleagues and understood that, while lower-value roles were more vulnerable to automation, “we have a responsibility to help colleagues move into higher-value roles”.
I have lost count of the number of times I have heard top executives talk in private about the relentless pressure they face to use AI to cut as many jobs as they can as fast as possible
A string of other bosses agreed, repeating what has become a global corporate mantra that AI is more likely to replace tasks, not whole jobs, and even if some jobs go, others would materialise and workers would be helped through the turmoil. Ultimately, said JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, leaders had to “get prepared, take care of your people, take care of society and I think we’ll be okay”.
Fine advice, but who is following it?
I have lost count of the number of times I have heard top executives talk in private about the relentless pressure they face to use AI to cut as many jobs as they can as fast as possible.
“We all say we’re using AI for ‘growth’ but in reality we’re using it for productivity and to lose jobs,” is how one put it earlier this year. “A dangerous snowball,” is how another described the trend.
Another said that when he asked a roomful of managers if they thought AI meant they could do without 50 per cent of their workforce, “80 per cent put up their hand”.
No wonder an NBC poll this year showed AI is one of the most loathed things in the United States, rating below even the contentious Ice agency and only more popular than Iran and the Democratic Party.
It is still unclear how many jobs are really being lost to AI and how many chief executives are trying to impress shareholders by citing the technology for lay-offs they would have done anyway.
Anthropic’s president, Daniela Amodei, said this month the AI group’s research showed that in 2025 and 2026, replacing jobs was a “tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what AI is doing”, though this could obviously change.
What is clear is that investors and boards have what the executive search group Spencer Stuart says is fading patience for chief executives “slow to transform their organisations for an AI-centric future”. That’s one reason chief executive turnover reached a record for the second year in a row in 2025.
And here’s the thing. Organisational overhauls may not be as alarming as a private company police force, but constant upheaval still spreads anxiety among workers and does not always please shareholders.
Hence the mixed response that Unilever’s latest boss, Fernando Fernández, received the other week when he brushed off investor concerns about change fatigue at the consumer goods giant by declaring: “I’m not paid to be lazy. Our people are not paid to be lazy.”
I have no idea if Fernández really thinks his staff are lazy. I do know history shows some corporate restructuring can work.
But I worry more about what history will eventually reveal about the way big employers respond to a technology still getting its skates on that may one day prove to be the most revolutionary humanity has seen. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
