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Kabir Aswani
Kabir Aswani is Vice President, Talent Development at Moody's Corporation, where he leads learning and development for the company's large businesses.
AI Anxiety Isn't About the Technology, It's About Uncertainty Plus Lack of Agency
Kabir's framing for AI-era workplace anxiety is precise: it rarely shows up as employees saying "I'm scared of AI." Instead, it shows up as quiet disengagement, withdrawal, or skepticism, and he argues the root cause is uncertainty combined with a lack of agency, not the technology itself. His counterargument to the fear that AI erodes the value of foundational skills is the opposite: he says AI actually increases the value of strong fundamentals, since it exposes weak ones immediately while strong fundamentals compound, and that you can't safely delegate a task to AI that nobody on the team deeply understands in the first place. He also argues that a skills strategy only builds trust when it leads somewhere tangible: teaching people to use AI tools without a visible path to new roles or relevance just makes the strategy feel theoretical.
Topics Kabir speaks on
- Why AI anxiety is about uncertainty and agency, not the tools themselves
- Why strong fundamentals matter more, not less, in an AI-enabled workplace
- Building visible skill pathways that connect learning to mobility
- Differentiating AI hesitancy from a broader culture of distrust
- Talent development strategy for large, complex organizations
Sessions with Achieve
Kabir is a featured panelist on the Achieve webcast "Growth vs. Well-Being Is a False Choice: Here's How HR Proves It" (February 5, 2026), presented in partnership with Fuel50 alongside Alyson Reece of Comerica and Murielle Larochelle of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In it, he lays out his "uncertainty plus lack of agency" framework for AI anxiety in detail and argues that leadership needs to shift the narrative from "here's the new tool" to "here's how we grow with the tool."
Connect
Want more on what it takes to build AI skill strategies that build trust instead of eroding it? Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network.