Insights

Sensitivity and AI: Investing Attention Where It Matters Most

Oct 08, 2025 - Daniel Goodenough, Jill Taylor

A New Currency of Business

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how we work. It scans data, drafts reports, manages tasks, and suggests creative ideas. Many, many organizations are investing in AI.

Yet a deeper question emerges: Where are we investing human attention?

In the rush to adopt AI, some companies treat employee attention as a cost to reduce. What gets missed is the awareness that where leaders invest their attention—and how they encourage employees to invest theirs—determines the growth of imagination, creativity, and meaning within a company.

The Hidden Assumption: Attention as a Cost

Traditional business thinking has treated attention as a finite expense. Each email, each meeting, each analysis is counted as time spent, an item on the productivity ledger. The logic goes: if AI can automate or absorb these tasks, then costs go down.This mindset misses that attention is an investment in becoming. When employees engage fully—sensing, reflecting, imagining—they are not simply performing tasks. They are developing capacity.

By outsourcing this work to AI, companies risk saving short-term time at the expense of long-term human growth. The question is not only, what are we paying attention to? It is also, what are we investing intention in.

Investing Intention

When we invest our attention (dictionary definition of attention: a condition of readiness), it becomes a creative force: noticing subtle patterns, discerning meaning, sensing opportunity. It is where new futures take shape.

When companies encourage employees to hand this layer over to AI—relying on tools to “tell them what matters”—they risk dulling the very human sensitivity that enables innovation. Leaders may want to ask: are we cultivating environments where employees invest their attention in growth?

Sensitivity as Strategic Investment

Sensitivity is a sophisticated form of attention. Research on highly sensitive individuals shows that they:

Process information more deeply.
Detect subtle cues in their environment.
Integrate emotions, values, and data for richer insight.
Make creative connections across domains.

These findings are supported by neuroscience: fMRI work links sensory-processing sensitivity with heightened activation in attention, awareness, and integration networks (Acevedo et al., 2014; Acevedo, 2018).These are precisely the qualities needed in an era of rapid change. Sensitivity helps leaders and teams read the edges of the environment—the early signals of what is coming next. Harvard Business Review explored this in “Sensitivity Can Be a Superpower at Work”.

When organizations invest in developing sensitivity across their workforce, they gain foresight, resilience, and creativity that no algorithm can replicate. Sensitivity is then both a personal trait and a collective capacity.

Business as an Agent of Human Capacity

Imagine if companies redefined their role: as agents of human potential.That would mean:

Valuing attention as an investment. Time spent reflecting, learning, and sensing would be seen as growth capital.
Creating conditions for employee sensitivity. Workplaces would reward depth, curiosity, and presence.
Investing in long-term capacity. Leaders would pair AI acceleration with opportunities for employees to expand their perceptual and creative range.

Such companies would generate futures—regenerative enterprises capable of adapting with intelligence and integrity.

A Campaign for Human Attention

What if we started seeing more headlines celebrating advances in human sensitivity, imagination, or capacity?

What if organizations chose to change that?

When attention is cultivated as an investment, we have the possibility to expand our ability to navigate complexity and co-create futures worth living.

By valuing attention as the most critical resource of our time, businesses can ensure that both AI and humanity evolve together— each serving a future where meaning and innovation thrive.