Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn. Which AI Reaction Is Killing Your Career?

The IMF estimates that 40% of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI, with that figure climbing to 60% in advanced economies. Goldman Sachs Research projects 6 to 7% of the workforce will be displaced during the transition, with entry-level knowledge workers (software engineers, customer service reps, junior creatives, junior analysts) taking the hit first. I think these estimates are wildly conservative. 

Office and administrative roles, finance, retail, customer service, legal, marketing, media and software. Every white-collar industry has a forecast hanging over it, and we’re all seeing it happen.

When the human nervous system perceives a threat, it has four default responses: fight, flight, freeze or fawn. They aren’t thoughtful decisions — they’re reflexes. Most of us cycle through all four during any meaningful inflection point, sometimes inside a single afternoon.

What I’ve watched over the last 18 months is that brands do exactly the same thing. The behaviors may look a little different — a lawsuit instead of a shouting match, a layoff instead of a packed-up apartment — but the underlying nervous system is identical. And the cost of staying stuck in any one of them is enormous.

Here’s what each one looks like in the wild.

Fight

Fight is the response that comes out swinging.

In December 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging the companies copied millions of articles to train ChatGPT. The Times has since been joined by more than 160 active AI copyright lawsuits — Disney and Universal against Midjourney, the major music labels against Suno and Udio, the Authors Guild against OpenAI. Anthropic alone settled one of those suits for $1.5 billion, the largest copyright settlement in US history.

Some of this fight is righteous. The Times has a real claim. Authors deserve compensation when their work is used without consent. Fight is the response that protects what matters when something genuinely valuable is being threatened.

But fight has a shadow side too. The shadow looks like an industry that mistakes every change for an attack. Brands that lash out at every cultural shift instead of pausing to ask which battles are theirs to wage. Leaders who burn through relational capital in conference rooms over things they could have moved through with a single honest conversation.

Fight, when a brand is stuck in it, looks like a perpetual siege.

Flight

Flight is the response that retreats.

Across the tech sector alone, AI has been cited in nearly 92,000 job-cut announcements since 2023, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Some of those decisions were strategic. Many were not. They were leaders staring at a balance sheet, sensing a storm coming, and reaching for the nearest lever that their board won’t bat an eye at. 

Flight is showing up across creative industries especially hard. Agencies are atrophying left and right. Marketing teams are outsourcing to AI without reimagining what their work could become. Editorial teams are hollowing out without reimagining what kind of journalism they actually want to do next.

The mark of flight isn’t that you’ve stopped moving. It’s that you’re moving away from the question instead of deeper into it. You’re cutting away the old but not building anything new. You’re laying people off but not articulating what you actually believe about your work in this new landscape.

I’m sympathetic to flight. Sometimes you genuinely do need to lighten the load — toss dead weight off the ship to survive the storm. But there’s a meaningful difference between intentionally tightening the belt and avoidance dressed up as decisiveness.

Freeze

Freeze is the response that locks up.

It’s the universities still without a coherent AI policy three years in. The mid-market companies whose leadership keeps putting “AI on next quarter’s agenda.” The healthcare orgs that have spent eighteen months in committee. The brands that keep nodding through strategy decks and never moving anything forward.

Freeze is the most common response I see, and it’s the easiest one to disguise. It looks like patience. It looks like prudence. It looks like “we’re just being careful and not over-reacting.” But underneath, there’s no actual deliberation happening — just the nervous system putting its head in the sane and waiting for the threat to pass.

It won’t pass.

While you’re frozen, your competitors are running their own experiments. Your team is making private decisions about whether your company can adapt. Your customers are forming opinions about whether you’re a brand that moves with the world or against it. If you’ve been “still figuring it out” since 2023, you’re not deliberating anymore. You’re stuck. And the cost of staying stuck compounds in ways that don’t show up on your dashboard (until they show up everywhere).

Fawn

Fawn is the response that capitulates.

Fawn is what happens when a brand abandons its identity to appease its new master. It’s “AI-first everything” rolled out before giving it a second thought. It’s the customer service department replaced wholesale with chatbots, on the assumption that what people wanted all along was helpful efficiency rather than meaningful relationship.

Klarna is the canonical example. In 2024, the company replaced roughly 700 customer service agents with an AI assistant built in partnership with OpenAI. The CEO publicly said he wanted Klarna to be OpenAI’s “favorite guinea pig.” For a few months, the numbers looked great — cost savings, response times, multilingual coverage. Then customer satisfaction tanked. By 2025, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted the company “went too far,” and Klarna began rehiring humans.

That’s what fawn looks like in practice: the rush to dismantle the very things that made you magical in the first place, in order to look like an early adopter. It’s the marketing agency that suddenly describes itself as “AI-native” without any underlying conviction (or experience). The legal firm whose new website reads like it was written by ChatGPT (because it was). The publisher who replaced their staff writers with synthetic content and watched their audience slowly, steadily drift away.

You can’t fawn your way into trust. People can feel it.

So where’s the hope? What’s the solution? 

I’m reminded of an Alan Watts line, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

I think this is my posture, and it would be a wise posture across the board. It’s not about compromising who we are. It’s not about abandoning our magic. It’s not about farming to the AI overlords. It’s about dancing. 

Dancing with change is an invitation to stay unmistakably, unequivocally yourself, while moving with what’s actually happening. 

The brands that come through this stretch sharper, stronger, and more themselves won’t be the ones who fought every change, fled the conversation, froze in committee, or fawned their way into irrelevance. They’ll be the ones who got honest about which stress response they were defaulting to — and chose to embrace what is.

That’s the move. Name where you’ve been stuck.

Soften your grip. And step into the dance.