"I Read That Citibank Is Training 147,000 Employees on AI. Here's the Question I Wish Someone Would Ask."

I saw a headline last week that Citibank is putting 147,000 employees through AI training. My first thought wasn't "that's impressive." It was: "What about the other training?"

Because here's what I keep coming back to in my work with organizations navigating transformation: We're obsessed with teaching people how to use new tools. We're silent on teaching leaders how to lead humans who are terrified those tools will replace them.

The Thing Nobody's Saying: When you roll out massive AI training without equally investing in leadership capabilities, you're essentially teaching people to be more efficient at their jobs while their leaders still don't know how to:

• Create enough psychological safety for someone to say "I'm scared about my future here"
• Connect this transformation to something that matters beyond "shareholder value"
• Navigate the reality that they themselves don't have all the answers

What This Looks Like in Real Life: I'm not going to pretend I have insider knowledge of Citi's strategy. I don't. But I can tell you what I'm seeing across organizations attempting similar transformations:

Employee gets AI training → learns the technical capability → goes back to their desk → their manager has no framework for having the conversation about what this means for their role, their growth, their value.

The AI works perfectly. The human relationship fractures.

The Reframe I'd Love to See: What if we approached transformation with equal investment? For every hour of AI training, an hour of leadership capability building. Not generic "communication skills" training. Specific capabilities for navigating complexity:

How do you HEAR what someone isn't saying when they're behind a screen in a hybrid meeting? How do you MOTIVATE people when you're asking them to learn tools that might eliminate parts of their job? How do you NAVIGATE change when you're honestly uncertain about what comes next?

Why This Matters: I'm not anti-AI. I'm pro-clarity. And I think the organizations that will actually realize ROI on their AI investments won't be the ones who trained everyone fastest. They'll be the ones whose leaders could bring people along through the uncertainty.

That's a leadership capability problem, not a technology problem.

What's your take? Are we over-indexing on tool training and under-indexing on leadership readiness?