AI is already leaving its mark on corporate America, with tech layoffs hitting 75,000 this year alone as companies prepare for the technology to rival humans in just five years time.
While this may fuel dreams of a two-day workweek—or fear an AI-fueled apocalypse—James Zallie, CEO of Fortune 500 food ingredient company Ingredion, has a clear answer: People—and culture—still come first.
“If you take your eye off either the customer or the employee and you get very internally focused, it’s a recipe for failure,” said Zallie in an appearance on the Inside the Ice House podcast, hosted by the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.
And while Zallie’s $8.7 billion company has embraced technology like AI in part to predict supply chain issues, refine recipe formulations, and keep up with regulations—letting anything distract from people and culture could backfire, the baby boomer said.
“I think in society today that if you don’t have a strong culture, your business will suffer. And if you don’t focus on people, you will also,” Zallie added. “People will see through whether you’re really living your values and whether you have a care for people in general.”
At a time when some companies like Meta and Target have rolled back DEI initiatives, Ingredion still includes “Everybody Belongs” as one of its five core values. And while serving as CEO is the dream job title for most business leaders, Zallie said in reality, he more so sees his job as a chief clarity officer of sorts—the messenger of what the company is doing—and why.
“We in positions of leadership and management have a responsibility and accountability to (employees) to continuously try to figure out on their behalf how they can have fulfilled careers, be motivated,” he said. “I look at my job as CEO as chief clarity officer.”
Fortune reached out to Zallie for further comment.
The debate over AI’s future rages on
While Ingredion has made it clear that people are their priority, other companies are rather confident they can do more with less people.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently said that his $2 trillion company would be shedding members of its corporate workforce thanks to generative AI’s enhanced capabilities.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Jassy wrote in an internal memo last month.
Microsoft has already put some of this into action by laying off 15,000 employees this year alone. And while the company cited the changes as a means to “best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace,” the cuts hint at prioritization of automation. Last year, AI saved the company $500 million in its call center alone, reports Bloomberg.
And while some CEOs like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Google’s Sundar Pichai have increasingly touted AI automation as somewhat of a flex, its replacement of workers has left many, such as software engineers, feeling helpless.
Instead of using layoffs as a means to create a more leaner operation, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said the wiser move is to double down on talent.
“The companies that are the smartest are going to hire more developers,” Dohmke said to The Silicon Valley Girl Podcast late last month.
“Because if you 10x a single developer, then 10 developers can do 100x,” he said.
