This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 11, 2026 - May 17, 2026

The impact of artificial intelligence (AI), along with the anxieties it brings, is being felt across the global workforce, making it increasingly important for companies to manage this transition. But local companies are still finding their footing in supporting the mental well-being of staff caught in its wake.

In addition to job loss concerns, employees — especially those in entry-level or senior roles — are beginning to feel insecure about their relevance as AI tools accelerate the pace and volume of their work.

Citing the 2025 Microsoft Work Trend Index, Dr Manju Appathurai, a psychologist and founder of leadership consultancy firm Mahat Advisory, says there is a widening gap between what businesses demand and what humans can sustainably deliver.

In the report, 82% of leaders were confident about using digital labour to expand workforce capacity within the next 12 to 18 months, but 80% of employees and leaders in the global workforce expressed the lack of time or energy to do work.

Even with the efficiencies AI brings, tying an employee’s worth to productivity can erode how workers view their own relevance, fuelling identity-related rather than work-related burnout.

“How are we supposed to keep up with this? This significant deficit, where the automation of the task is done via our cognitive offloading, has outpaced our own ability to redefine what it means to be a professional in Kuala Lumpur and in Asean,” says Manju.

Joan Low, CEO and founder of digital mental health platform ThoughtFull World Pte Ltd, points out the new reality of an anxiety gap, where a space grows between what AI can do and what people feel prepared to handle.

“Even at ThoughtFull, where we actively invest in AI tools for my team and encourage adoption, we see people who use AI every day still quietly wondering whether they’re enough,” she says.

“That feeling of inadequacy, of constantly needing to prove your value against a tool that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t get tired and doesn’t ask for raises — that’s a real psychological burden. And we’re not talking about it enough.”

Yet, the anxieties that AI stirs in the executive suite look quite different from those on the ground. Leaders are removed from the day-to-day implementation, and that distance produces its own distinct pressures.

Manju says leaders fear a loss of influence rather than a loss of labour.

This manifests as “anticipatory anxiety”, which is the psychological distress caused by imagining a future in which a leader’s strategic anchor is no longer relevant.

“When leaders believe their monopoly on wisdom — long taken to be the golden ticket — is being dismantled by silicon agents, they often succumb to algorithmic fatalism: the resigned belief that the machine is the new authority. This anxiety is particularly acute in the Asean context, where leadership is historically tied to being the person with all the answers,” says Manju.

One of the reasons employers still struggle to implement mental health support is that the workforce is still largely treated as a benefit rather than an infrastructure investment.

Token initiatives such as a “mental health day” barely scratch the surface of practical support, says Low, particularly when the stressors are new, fast-moving and deeply personal.

Mental health is also still relatively stigmatised, which is a barrier that will not be easy to undo.

“If people don’t feel safe saying ‘I’m struggling’, they’re certainly not going to say ‘I’m struggling because I’m scared of AI’. So, employers are left guessing why performance dips, why attrition goes up, why quiet quitting happens and they never connect it back to the underlying anxiety,” Low adds.

Upskilling has emerged as the go-to response to AI disruption, but experts caution that it is not enough on its own.

Low says jumping straight to training misses the emotional core of the problem. An employee’s sense of value must be acknowledged before any upskilling conversation begins.

“Immediately sending people to a prompt engineering course when they’re scared for their job can feel dismissive, like you’re patching over the fear rather than addressing it,” she says.

“Upskilling matters, helping people grow is genuinely important, but it needs to come alongside honest conversations about the future, psychological safety amid uncertainty, and access to mental health support for those who are really struggling.

“Skill without emotional readiness is a short-term fix. You want people who are both capable and resilient, and those are different things that need different kinds of investments.”

Azran Osman Rani, CEO and co-founder of employee wellness solution firm Naluri, speaks from the company’s perspective on adopting a multi-layered strategy to address mental health at the individual, team and systemic levels.

With frontline employees, there is a lot of emphasis on self-care to ensure that no staff is left behind when it comes to caring for their own well-being.

The next tier focuses on managers, covering how to recognise the signs of declining mental health in a team, how to initiate difficult conversations, and what procedures to follow if an employee reaches a crisis point.

Azran calls this “mental first aid”, delivered through one- or two-day certification programmes.

Leaders are taught to think about the situation strategically, how to understand generational differences, how to give and receive feedback differently, and how to create a culture of psychological safety.

When leaders openly share their own mental health concerns, they signal to junior staff that it is safe to do the same, building collective resilience to changes such as AI.

Naluri also runs a separate programme for senior management, whose influence shapes the culture of the whole organisation.

“We need these different levels. If you address only one of these levels without the other two, you can imagine getting a very limited impact on the organisation,” says Azran.

“Once we get to managers and leaders, I start to use more data, more case studies. Then, they begin to understand it more clearly. You have to speak their language as a leader. So, I need different trainers and coaches to handle managers and executive leaders, and different ones to handle employees.”

Tsubasa Nakazawa, managing director of Kintone Southeast Asia, a customisable workplace management platform, says the company and its parent entity Cybozu hold a dedicated manager training session that teaches leaders how to communicate with their subordinates.

Though the training does not focus solely on mental health, the culture of open communication that it cultivates naturally spills over into those conversations, too.

The company’s human resources department is also proactive in providing information about how employees can cope with stress and uncomfortable situations, as well as self-care strategies.

Nakazawa says: “[We try] to build an environment in which you can easily bring up those rather sensitive topics. It took years for us to build this environment; it does not happen overnight. A little bit at a time adds up to a lot.

“It’s like stacking and accumulating their knowledge and experience, sticking with the same theme in general. That’s how you really embed it into corporate culture, systems and treatment measures for every manager.”

He notes that management can be a lonely role, and the training helps by creating a horizontal network, where section and division managers can share common challenges with their teams.

“Through one-on-one communication, or communication in general, it’s very important to penetrate corporate culture throughout the organisation,” he says.

For leaders themselves, the shift requires moving from managing output to orchestrating what Mahat Advisory’s Manju calls a “hybrid cognition loop”, which is akin to a conversation between the AI and the human — where computational tasks are left to the technology, and managers are responsible for providing intentional input of human social understanding and real-world nuances to navigate their roles.

In addition to employee support, leaders need dedicated peer-to-peer safety networks, such as the Asean AI Safety Network, to discuss identity threat triggers without judgement.

“By engaging in a strategic offloading framework, leaders can identify which parts of their professional ego are tied to rote decision-making and pivot towards a value-based ontology rather than a superficial identity,” says Manju.

“This transition allows them to reach a new professional equilibrium, where they no longer compete with the machine but instead orchestrate it to achieve a higher sovereignty of value, which provides much freedom from mental anguish.”

ThoughtFull’s Low says burnout, rising attrition and growth costs are now hitting organisations simultaneously, all rooted in the same declining mental health. Yet, many companies still address each issue with a separate budget and task force.

Hiring and onboarding into a culture that has not addressed its wellness problems only deepens the costs. “You’re spending on growth without protecting the foundation it depends on. So, the real question I put to leaders isn’t ‘can you afford to invest in mental health?’; instead, it’s ‘can you afford to keep trying to grow without it?’” she says.

“We are past the era where you can ignore wellness and stay competitive for talent. Increasingly, especially among younger workers, the question isn’t whether a company has a mental health policy, but whether the culture supports it. If the answer is no, you’re at a disadvantage in hiring and retention.”

For productivity-focused leaders, Kintone’s Nakazawa is direct — a workplace without psychological safety will ultimately undermine performance. He calls it “the invisible cost of neglect”, one that must be weighed alongside the upfront investment in support.

“It is important for leaders and managers to understand the anxieties employees are facing and to recognise such signs. Then, if there is strong pushback from team members, they need to pause and reassess what is going on, what they have done and, if needed, change course. It is an invisible cost because it is difficult to quantify,” says Nakazawa.

Naluri’s Azran adds that providing mental health care can reduce hospitalisation costs. Conditions such as high stress or depression can lead one to develop unhealthy habits, such as binge eating, disrupted sleep and reduced social and physical activity. These can contribute to higher long-term medical costs, but addressing the root causes of mental health issues can reduce visits to clinics and, in some cases, hospitals.

“The more people get therapy and coaching, the less they’re going to have headaches and dizziness or need take sick leave,” he says.

One of Naluri’s goals is to increase the accessibility and affordability of mental health, and Azran says it is working on including mental health care as part of a company’s health insurance.

At present, services such as psychiatric treatment for mental health care might be part of one’s insurance, but little is offered for declining mental health in the earlier stages.

“The insurance companies are saying they see the value in this; so, I want to promote it and make it more affordable for companies to get mental health care as part of the insurance coverage,” Azran says. Naluri is pushing to bundle mental health coverage directly into standard health insurance policies.

Government enforcement on mental health-related policies can also play a role in ensuring that workplace wellness is a priority, but Low stresses that policy alone is insufficient.

“It has to be implemented with cultural intelligence, not just transplanted from Western frameworks,” she says.

She points to the recent implementation of the Psychosocial Risk Management (PrisMA) framework introduced by the Department of Occupational Safety and Health under the Ministry of Human Resources. It is an encouraging example of an effective approach that is starting to emerge in Malaysia.

“For context, PrisMA gives employers a concrete methodology to identify, assess and address psychosocial hazards in the workplace. It normalises workplace conversations without leading with a clinical framing, which sits more comfortably in a Malaysian context.”

Such regulation creates structure and accountability, with accessible tools that make compliance feel achievable rather than overwhelming.

On the issue of mental health being a taboo, Low says that while legislation cannot take away stigma directly, leaders and authority figures can create conditions where stigma has less power.

“When leaders speak openly, when employees see that getting help doesn’t end your career, when mental health is discussed in town halls alongside KPIs (key performance indicators), that’s what shifts culture. Policy can mandate the infrastructure, but it’s up to leaders to make it safe enough to use,” she says.

AI is not going anywhere. The onus is now on individuals, not just organisations, to find a way to adapt, say the stakeholders.

Azran draws a parallel with exposure therapy, where a person with a phobia gradually acclimatises through repeated, controlled contact. The same logic applies to AI, he argues: The more workers encounter it as a tool rather than a threat, the less power the fear holds.

“AI will change the nature of our jobs, but it doesn’t mean I no longer need to hire roles such as a creative designer. Have you heard of any marketing agency that has said ‘I don’t need a single creative designer’?” Azran says.

ThoughtFull runs weekly AI sharing sessions where employees can bring something they have tried, whether a tool, prompt or workflow, and discuss it openly with colleagues. The goal is to let people learn out loud rather than feel pressured to arrive as experts.

The shift from treating AI as a threat to something to be figured out together is, Low says, sorely missing from most workplaces.

“People stop competing with the tool and start getting curious about it. They support each other. And, yes, productivity goes up but, more importantly, the anxiety goes down, because nobody feels like they’re supposed to already know everything,” she says.

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