Everyone's obsessed with GPUs. More compute, more power, more scaling laws. And sure, those matter - they're real bottlenecks on the road to whatever AGI future the techno-optimists are dreaming about.
But that's not what the world needs right now.
What we actually need are EPUs - Empathy Processing Units.
Your employees are living in this weird psychological space where they're simultaneously excited and terrified.
They see AI making them more effective at their jobs - and they wonder if that effectiveness will eventually make them obsolete.
They're watching their index funds grow as trillion-dollar companies get even bigger - while worrying about their kids growing up in a world where AI has eroded critical thinking.
This isn't a hardware problem. It's a leadership problem.
The Real Challenge
Yes, the models will keep getting smarter. They'll ace every exam, including Humanity's Last Exam. But none of that matters if your people are paralyzed by fear and uncertainty.
Because what leaders are missing is this: implementing AI isn't just a technical challenge. It's a deeply human one.
Your employees aren't resisting AI because they don't understand the technology - they're hesitant because they're trying to protect something they value:
- A job they love
- Colleagues they care about
- An industry they're invested in
- A livelihood in a world that's getting more expensive every day
And yeah, bringing AI into that job might make them better at it. But it also might lead to their own replacement.
Both of those things can be true at the same time.
That's Where Empathy Comes In
Leaders who win in this moment won't be the ones who deploy AI the fastest. They'll be the ones who understand what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that deployment.
The ones who recognize that "this is simultaneously thrilling and worrisome" isn't a contradiction - it's just reality.
And here's the thing: we're living through a productivity paradox. AI tools are making individuals more productive, more profitable, more valuable in their roles - but those gains aren't aggregating up to the organizational level yet. Why? Because top-down mandates without human connection don't work.
The world needs more leaders who are willing to sit down with frontline employees and discuss both the fear and the excitement. Leaders who use these tools themselves, who understand them inside and out, who know what it actually feels like to work alongside AI.
We need change management. We need human connection. We need to combine top-down technological edicts with bottom-up implementation that takes into account how people really behave and really feel in their lives at work.
We need more EPUs, not more GPUs.