I didn't set out to write a book about AI. I set out to tell the truth about what happens when organizations move fast and forget the people inside them. I've seen that story before. I lived it in ESG. And I'm watching it play out again, with higher stakes and faster consequences.

For more than two decades, I built strategy and communications for organizations navigating big, complex, uncomfortable transformations. I founded Sensiba LLP's Sustainability Practice, the first holistic ESG practice at a U.S. accounting firm, and spent years helping companies figure out how to talk about their values, their impact, and their obligations to the people inside and outside their walls.

What I watched during the ESG era was a familiar and ultimately painful pattern. A wave of pressure arrives. Leadership responds with urgency. Frameworks get built, metrics get tracked, annual reports get published. And somewhere in all of it, the actual commitments get hollowed out. Greenwashing became the word for what happened when the story got ahead of the substance, when organizations performed values they hadn't actually built. The cost wasn't just reputational. It was a fundamental erosion of trust: with employees who had believed the mission, and with clients and stakeholders who had staked their own credibility on it.

That breach of trust took years to rebuild in some organizations. In others, it never fully recovered.

We are now watching the same dynamic unfold with AI, and I've started calling it what it is: efficiency-washing.

Organizations are rolling out AI initiatives with the language of transformation and empowerment. Employees are being told that AI will free them to do more meaningful work. Leaders are announcing productivity gains and capability upgrades. And the people on the ground, the ones whose roles are quietly shifting, whose skills are being reclassified, whose sense of professional identity is eroding in real time, are being asked to trust a process that was never designed with them in mind.

When the gap between the narrative and the lived experience becomes impossible to ignore, trust breaks again. With employees who feel deceived. With clients who believed the transformation story. With teams who needed honesty and got messaging instead.

I wrote The Human Cost of AI because I've seen this movie before, and I know what it costs when we let it play out unchallenged. The solution isn't to slow down AI adoption. It's to tell the truth about what it actually requires of the people inside our organizations, and to lead with the honesty that greenwashing taught us, too late, that we should have led with all along.

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Jennifer lives in Pleasanton, California. She is available for podcast conversations, speaking engagements, and consulting with organizations navigating AI-driven change. She is also the author of Protect Your Peace and the novel Hot Flashes & Cold Chardonnay.