The Future Of AI Is Too Important To Leave To Someone Else

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.