When Speed Becomes the Story: Purpose Keeps It Human

Kathryn spent twenty-five years knowing customers by voice. Twenty-five years of hearing what they needed before they finished asking. Then one morning, she realised something quietly devastating: the digital assistant she’d been training wasn’t learning to help her. It was learning to replace her.

In July, Kathryn became one of forty-five employees made redundant in a major bank’s AI rollout. The logic was simple: automation cuts call volumes. Efficiency rises. The spreadsheet said so.

The spreadsheet was wrong.

Within weeks, call volumes spiked. The union intervened. Under pressure, the company admitted its mistake, apologised, and offered the jobs back. A happy ending? Not quite.

Because Kathryn’s story isn’t about one bank or one bot. It’s not resistance to change. It’s the cost of speed without sense-making and of progress that forgets the people who made it possible.

Efficiency without humanity isn’t innovation. It’s decay in motion.

As Kathryn said, “While I embrace the use of AI and I can see a purpose for it in the workplace and outside, I believe there needs to be some sort of regulation to prevent copyright infringements… or replacing humans. You still need the human touch.”

Her words echo a truth too often lost in innovation agendas: technology can optimise process, but it cannot replicate presence. It can automate the task, but not the trust. And that’s the line too many organisations are crossing, trading transformation for output and meaning for metrics.

When a system optimises for efficiency and forgets humanity, it decays from within. What it builds isn’t a culture. It’s a transaction engine. And that difference matters.

The moment an organisation stops breathing with its people, stops bonding, learning, and evolving as a living intelligence it loses the very advantage efficiency was meant to create.

Because you can automate the task, but not the trust.

You can replace Kathryn’s role, but not the calm in her voice or the quiet confidence that made others feel safe. You can replicate her outputs, but not the web of relationships, memory, and meaning she wove, the human fabric that makes an organisation more than a list of roles.

You can’t code the continuity she carried after twenty-five years of representing a brand with care, or the quiet ways her presence shaped the rhythm of a team.

That connection doesn’t stop at the office door. It ripples into families, friendships, and communities. Into the stories people tell about the company, and the pride that turns a job into identity and a workplace into belonging.

All of that carries value, real, measurable value, and it deserves to be accounted for in a full-spectrum profit and loss.

Every organisation is a human system.

Purpose is the glue that holds the human quotient together. Not the kind of purpose that starts with why, but the kind that starts with who: who Kathryn was, who she was in partnership with her customers, who she became through decades of service, and how her way of being shaped the culture around her. That’s what I call The DNA of Purpose.

This is where a brand truly lives: not in strategy documents or logos, but in the shared nervous system of human experience. Brands are living systems, sustained by emotion, existing in the connections between people rather than in spite of them.

The bank didn’t just remove forty-five jobs. They severed forty-five feedback loops of trust, care, connection, and community. They erased the invisible circuitry that made the organisation feel alive.

When you sever human code, the symptoms show up fast.

According to media reports, within weeks the bank saw it. Call volumes the algorithm promised to reduce began to climb. The bank acknowledged its modelling was wrong.

Customers waited longer. Familiar voices disappeared. Employees reportedly worked overtime to fill the widening gap between digital efficiency and human experience. The spreadsheet said savings. The system said stress.

What happened inside that bank wasn’t an isolated glitch. It was an early signal of a deeper pattern: the velocity of transformation outpacing the people inside it. When organisations stop seeing themselves as living systems and start treating work as interchangeable tasks, they forget that every change has consequences. Shift one function and the whole organism feels it.

And in this case, the living system did what all living systems do when under threat: it activated its immunity. The humans pushed back. Because humans don’t just execute systems, we sustain them. When innovation forgets that, efficiency becomes erosion.

The balance point isn’t between humans and machines. It’s between speed and sense making, the art of weaving technology into the living fabric of the organisation so that insight, empathy, and trust remain intact. Without that, human purpose, the connective tissue that aligns people, meaning, and momentum, is cut.

So here’s the real question: how do we choose both? How do we harness automation without hollowing out the human system it depends on?

Technology can cut costs, but if it erodes trust, belonging, or wellbeing, those savings are an illusion. You don’t win by draining what gives work its meaning.

The leaders who will thrive through the AI transition are those who measure the full cost of efficiency — not just output, but impact. Not just productivity, but purpose. Because in every healthy system, balance creates endurance. Efficiency without balance creates collapse.

Every living system that endures knows how to hold speed in tension with sustainability, and intelligence in partnership with interdependence. The same law applies to leadership. It’s about weaving machine logic into human purpose so the system evolves without losing its soul.

Because at its core, leadership isn’t just about direction — it’s about legacy. The imprint we leave on the systems we shape and the people we serve.

Legacy is the deeper question.

As the late Dr Jane Goodall said, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

That’s the moment we’re standing in now, spinning the dice between decay and discovery.

The future isn’t asking us to choose between humans and machines. It’s asking us to remember what ignites purpose, the spark that keeps clients, colleagues, and communities aligned.

Because progress that serves life doesn’t just sustain it. It expands it.

And that’s the kind of progress worth leading.

Keep meaning in motion.
Our future depends on it.

Rebecca