CPO Forum 2026

Humanize to Reinvent: Turning Human Potential into Business Impact

Hewitt Consulting, in partnership with Sasin, co-hosted the second CPO Forum, “Humanize to Reinvent: Turning Human Potential into Business Impact.” The forum is part of the 100 Outperforming Enterprises Program, a joint initiative between Sasin and Hewitt. The program’s objective is to empower 100 enterprises in Thailand to achieve sustainable growth through purpose-driven leadership, a culture of innovation, and strategic people management. This year’s forum highlighted the critical need for leadership to remain human-centric despite the era of artificial intelligence, automating work and labor, and ultimately increasing productivity. In his opening speech, Professor Ian Fenwick, Sasin Director, addressed the role of human beings in the age of AI, arguing that people need to lead AI rather than be led by it. He invoked a warning from Canadian technology writer Cory Doctorow, who warns against becoming a “reverse centaur,” a mythical creature, half human, half horse, but with the roles reversed. “A reverse centaur is someone who allows the machine to be the head, with the human simply providing the rear end and the animation — people conscripted to work at the machine’s pace instead of the other way around,” Dr. Ian said. Associate Professor Drew B. Mallory, Sasin Inclusion Ambassador and Director of Research at the Neurodiversity at Work Research Centre (NWRC), shared two recent cases in which human use of AI resulted in failure, along with psychological analysis of why these failures occurred. He presented these insights and provided some solutions during one of the CPO Forum 2026 sessions, “People at the Heart of Transformation: A Psychologist’s View on Why the AI Revolution Must Start with People, Not Machines”:

1. Speed Over Friction Leads to Disaster Dr. Drew brought up the case of Starbucks Korea’s “Tank Day” tumbler campaign, launched on May 18, which coincides with the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when a mass protest against the South Korean military government occured. The marketing team at Starbucks Korea also generated slogans with AI, that suggested the phrase “Thwack it on the table,” which Koreans interpreted as a reference to a notorious 1987 police claim that the student activist Park Jong-chul died as he “hit the desk with a thwack.” Seven different managers signed off on the campaign without opening the files. This cultural insensitivity resulted in public outrage, with customers cancelling card payments and smashing Starbucks mugs in protest.So why did this catastrophe occur? Dr. Drew warned that people are falling into a psychological trap called automation bias, the human tendency to assume that an authoritative machine is flawless. “We turn our brains off because we’re cognitively lazy,” said Dr. Drew. To prevent automation bias, he advised companies to mandate institutional friction.“Optimization for speed without the deliberate friction of ethical review and interaction among peers is a reputational time bomb,” said Dr. Drew, “Require your teams to manually verify, justify, and sign-off on anything that touches the machine or anyone else who might sound like they know a little too much.”
2. Decouple Linguistic Fluency from Factual Accuracy. Build Human Guardrails First. Dr. Drew brought up another disastrous case at Samsung Electronics where they experienced three separate leaks within 20 days in April 2023. Engineers in the semiconductor division pasted proprietary source code, another uploaded the company’s closely guarded chip yield-optimization algorithms, and put confidential executive meeting notes directly into a public AI chatbot in an effort to work faster.Dr. Drew calls this psychological trap the confidence heuristic, evaluating factual accuracy based purely on linguistic fluency; in short, believing the confident liar.- Dr. Drew’s rule of thumb: Learn from Starbucks’ failure and decouple fluency from fact, by learning to be skeptical of what sounds overly polished or too good to be true. – His recommendation for leaders: build human guardrails into workflows before AI is rolled out, not after something goes wrong.
3. Invest in Rehabilitative Socialization and Foster Public, Direct Conflict Resolution: Dr. Drew also leaned into his own coaching experiences mentoring hundreds of Thai executives to share his observations on incoming talent. According to data from Microsoft and LinkedIn that Dr. Drew cited, 75% of global knowledge workers are now using generative AI at work, but 68% say they’re struggling to keep pace with it. What’s more worrisome is that 52% of employees who use AI on important tasks are actively hiding it, and 53% worry that being open about their AI use will make them appear replaceable.

Moreover, employees are quietly hiding their AI use from colleagues and managers, while asking AI how to deal with problems at work instead of dealing with the person directly. All these statistics show that people are not collaborating together, depending more on chatbots for workplace solutions, decreasing real human interactions, and thereby breeding a culture of silence and mistrust. From his own coaching practice in Southeast Asia, including teaching and mentoring executives through Sasin’s Connect+ Executive MBA program, Dr. Drew said that the solution is in psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, speaking up, and disagreeing, “…the one thing AI can never generate.” He linked this directly to Thai’s cultural norm called “krengjai,” which he defined as the “cultural tendency to self-monitor, avoid causing discomfort, and protect social harmony; an avoidance behavior that can lead to comfortable interactions but also create a dangerous “hierarchy of silence” in the workplace–particularly when Thai workers don’t learn to refine the skill over time “AI makes krengjai dangerously easy, because instead of dealing with the frustration and discomfort of interacting with you — a messy human being — I go and type my question into a clean chatbot and get a clean and perfect answer that I use to send a perfect email. This is a big problem,” said Dr. Drew. This phenomenon where people stay polite in order to avoid controversy isn’t just limited to Thailand, as Dr. Drew demonstrated in the Starbucks and Samsung case where employees didn’t dare to voice their opinions regarding the doomed campaign for fear of disrupting the social harmony of the organization. To avoid a similar catastrophe, Dr. Drew urged companies to invest disproportionately in rehabilitative socialization, or spending time together to compensate for AI offloading. This messy, human interaction can help to foster a culture of trust where workers build interpersonal bridges and collaborate together rather than turn to technology for solutions–particularly when leaders are modeling openness and authenticity on their own. The second point Dr. Drew emphasized is for companies to build a culture where open dialogue is safe and where conflicts are resolved directly in person. “You have to give your team explicit permission to disagree, negotiate, and collaborate face-to-face in real time.” He concluded that although technology is changing work, humanizing an organizaton’s leadership is the only way to reinvent the future in a sustainable way: through creating psychological safety and trust in the workplace, where all of us feel comfortable just being human.