Greg Salvato is CEO of TouchPoint One and founder of ApplicantPrime, advancing CX performance and career opportunity.
In October 2025, I wrote about why compassion must be a core leadership principle in the age of AI. As technology transforms how we work and live, our responsibility to one another becomes more important, not less. I’m now more convinced of this than ever. I’m also more concerned.
AI offers extraordinary opportunities to improve productivity, accelerate discovery, expand access to knowledge and solve previously intractable problems. I’m an enthusiastic participant in this transformation, but enthusiasm shouldn’t be confused with naivety, nor should technological advancement automatically be mistaken for human progress.
The greatest risk may not be what we don’t know about AI. It may be what we already know and our willingness to ignore it.
We’ve Seen This Before
Consider the internet, smartphones, social media and the algorithms influencing what we see, believe and do. These innovations have delivered enormous benefits alongside serious consequences involving privacy, manipulation, social well-being and concentrated power. Many of these consequences were anticipated and debated long before becoming widespread. Too often, we failed to act with sufficient urgency, coordination or conviction.
Commercial ambition and competition drove these technologies forward. Meanwhile, public trust, optimism, complacency, fear and a growing sense of powerlessness discouraged scrutiny or resistance. Some technologies even encourage the passive habits that make questioning their influence less likely.
The pattern is familiar. Innovation advances, benefits accumulate unevenly, consequences emerge and society struggles to respond. AI threatens to repeat that pattern at unprecedented speed and scale.
The Responsibility We Can’t Delegate
AI can help us learn, investigate complex problems, challenge assumptions and make better-informed decisions. The more capable it becomes, however, the more tempting it is to delegate not only our work but our judgment and, eventually, our sense of responsibility.
We can delegate tasks and execution to machines. We can’t delegate responsibility for the consequences, nor can we assign that responsibility exclusively to developers, executives or policymakers. Their obligations are substantial, but our collective future is too important to leave entirely in anyone else’s hands.
Corporate competition rewards speed, financial markets reward returns and political institutions face competing pressures. Even well-intentioned leaders can make individually rational decisions that produce collectively undesirable outcomes. Compassion alone won’t overcome these forces. It requires courage, independent judgment, discipline and collective action.
A Practical Responsibility Playbook
Frameworks for AI safety, ethics and governance already exist, but frameworks don’t implement themselves, and we can’t wait for someone else to deliver a perfect solution. I’ve developed a few practical principles to guide my own decisions and hold myself accountable. They require no special expertise, and I believe anyone can apply them.
1. Understanding What You’re Enabling
Before adopting, deploying or endorsing AI, consider what it changes. Who benefits? Who bears the consequences? Who’s accountable? Technical expertise isn’t required to recognize foreseeable human consequences.
2. Thinking For Yourself And Doing Your Homework
Don’t automatically accept assurances from technology providers, employers, governments or AI systems. Question assumptions, investigate incentives, seek competing perspectives and verify claims. AI itself is an extraordinary research and learning tool. Use it to strengthen your judgment, not replace it.
3. Exercising Your Influence
Start where you stand. Your profession, community and circumstances offer opportunities to make a difference. Choose an issue you understand or care about, define meaningful progress and act. Find others who share your concerns. Our individual influence varies, but collectively, it can be extraordinary.
4. Refusing To Delegate Accountability
When AI influences decisions affecting employment, healthcare, education, financial security or fundamental rights, identifiable people and institutions must remain responsible. Insist on transparency, meaningful oversight and mechanisms to challenge and correct harmful outcomes.
5. Holding Yourself Accountable
Good intentions and vigorous activity aren’t measures of success. Establish goals, evaluate outcomes, acknowledge failures and adjust course. Are our choices improving human opportunity, dignity, security and well-being? Apply the standards you demand of others to yourself.
6. Participating And Persisting
Support credible research, responsible organizations and effective public oversight. Challenge practices that compromise human welfare. Hold institutions accountable and help improve the systems through which they’re governed. Responsible stewardship requires sustained participation, not occasional expressions of concern.
These principles are a foundation for shaping regulations, technical safeguards and institutional reform. Each carries an essential question: What am I prepared to do about it?
Compassion At Scale
Through my work in customer experience technology, I’ve witnessed AI’s impact on the workforce firsthand. It was the issue closest to my professional experience, so that’s where I began. Helping people navigate career transitions eventually inspired ApplicantPrime, an initiative to make meaningful career assistance more accessible. Others will find their starting points in education, healthcare, privacy or countless areas where AI’s reshaping lives.
Individual acts of compassion matter enormously, but generosity alone can’t address disruption across entire industries. Compassion at scale means multiplying those efforts and ensuring human welfare influences our decisions, incentives and definitions of success. An organization using AI to improve productivity and profitability may accomplish something valuable. Whether it contributes to broader human progress is another question, and it’s one we have a responsibility to address.
What We Choose To Give
I’m an eternal optimist. I believe AI can create extraordinary opportunity, prosperity, discovery and human flourishing. However, optimism is a belief in possibility, not a substitute for disciplined action and accountability. We’ve devoted extraordinary intelligence, capital, talent and rigor to developing AI. We must bring comparable commitment to managing its consequences and ensuring its benefits advance human welfare while respecting fundamental rights.
I previously argued that compassion must guide leadership in the AI age. That responsibility has never belonged exclusively to those with titles or authority. We are all leaders through our choices and influence.
We can’t control every consequence of AI, but neither are we powerless to shape its future. Each of us has a place to begin, a contribution to make and the opportunity to join others in pursuing something better. The responsibility is ours, individually and collectively, as is the extraordinary opportunity.
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