I have spent years speaking to hospitality professionals, human resources organizations, nursing associations, staffing firms, blind business owners, square dance callers, and more. On the surface those groups look nothing alike. But when I stand in front of them and start talking about trust, connection, communication, and what it actually costs to show up as a real human being in a world that increasingly rewards performance over presence — the room goes quiet the same way every time.

Because they are all dealing with the same thing.

Gallup just put a number on it.

Global employee engagement dropped again in 2025, falling to 20%. Its lowest point since 2020. The first time in Gallup's history that engagement has declined two consecutive years in a row. Low engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity last year.

That number lives in every industry. In every organization. In every team that is going through the motions of showing up without actually being present.

Meanwhile, organizations everywhere are investing in AI — tens of billions of dollars — and only 12% of employees in those organizations strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done.

The technology is ready. The humans are the variable.

That is not a technology problem. That is a leadership problem. And underneath the leadership problem is something I have been talking about for years across three different keynotes:

It is a sincerity problem.

The engagement problem is a complaint problem.

When people do not feel seen, they complain. When they do not feel equipped, they resist. When they do not feel safe, they withdraw. When they do not trust leadership, they perform compliance instead of bringing real commitment.

Gallup found that globally, 40% of employees reported significant daily stress in 2025. Twenty-two percent reported anger. Twenty-three percent reported sadness. Twenty-two percent reported loneliness. All elevated above pre-pandemic levels.

Underneath many of those numbers is frustration without a path. Fear without reassurance. Change without trust.

My keynote Complaint Free Workplace: Turning Complainers into Collaborators addresses exactly this. Not by telling people to stop complaining — that does not work and everyone knows it. By helping organizations understand what complaints are actually saying, and building the conditions where people move from blame to ownership, from reactivity to contribution, from grumbling to genuine collaboration.

A complaint-free culture is not a culture where nobody says anything hard. It is a culture where people have learned how to say the hard things in ways that move the work forward rather than poison the well.

Gallup's data suggests that engagement is, in part, a measure of readiness for change. Organizations trying to navigate AI, restructuring, or any major disruption through disengaged, complaining teams are not facing a technology challenge. They are facing a human one.

The leadership problem is a sincerity problem.

Gallup found that the strongest predictor of whether AI actually changes anything in an organization is not the sophistication of the software. It is whether a direct manager shows up as a human being and helps their team walk through something new together. Employees whose manager actively supports their team's use of AI are 8.7 times as likely to say AI has transformed their work.

8.7 times. Because of one human being deciding to be present rather than perform presence.

Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022. Leaders report significantly higher daily stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness than the people they lead — while performing resilience for everyone around them.

This is the world my keynote The S Word: Wielding Sincerity in a World of Performance was built for.

Sincerity is not authenticity. Authenticity is about you — your truth, your expression, your brand. Sincerity is about us. It is the alignment between what you think, feel, say, and do in relationship with another person. It is the practice of showing up without the wax — without the performance of leadership, the performance of empathy, the performance of a culture that looks healthy on the slide deck while people quietly disengage in the hallways.

The SWORD framework I teach — Self-Awareness, Witness, Openness, Repair, Debrief — gives leaders and teams the specific, repeatable behaviors that build trust when it is easiest to perform and hardest to be real. Not as a philosophy. As a practice. Operational behaviors for a high-change world.

In best-practice organizations, 79% of managers are engaged — nearly four times the global average. Those organizations made a decision about what kind of culture they would build. Sincerity is not the soft version of that decision. It is the foundation of it.

The AI problem is a humanity problem.

Here is what nobody in the AI productivity conversation wants to say out loud: the technology is not the bottleneck. Despite roughly $40 billion in enterprise AI investment, 95% of organizations have seen zero measurable impact on profits. OpenAI's own 2025 enterprise report states that the primary constraints are no longer model performance or tooling. They are organizational readiness and implementation.

In other words: the humans are the variable. The humans have always been the variable.

My newest keynote, Wielding Humanity: Staying Human, Trusted, and Connected in the Age of AI, makes the case that in a world where machines can simulate empathy, generate presence, and perform connection with increasing fluency — the real thing does not become less valuable.

It becomes more rare.

MIT Sloan's research identifies the human capacities least likely to be replaced by AI: empathy and presence, judgment, creativity, and hope. Not because AI cannot imitate them — it can, with remarkable fluency. But because the imitation will not replace the real thing. What people need from each other, in organizations and in life, is not a convincing performance of care. It is actual care. Presence that costs something. The kind that registers in the nervous system as real.

The risk is not that AI replaces these capacities. The risk is that we stop practicing them. That we outsource the emotional labor — the hard conversation, the moment of sitting with someone's difficulty, the silence that needs to be held — and quietly lose the muscle.

This keynote asks leaders, teams, and organizations a simple question: as machines get better at sounding human, what becomes even more essential about being one?

And it gives them practical answers grounded in research, in story, and in the particular perspective of someone who has spent a career standing in front of strangers and deciding, every single time, whether to perform or be real.

Different industries. Same human challenge.

Gallup's report covers every region of the world and every sector of the economy. The numbers are different. The underlying story is the same.

People want to feel seen. They want to trust the people they work with and work for. They want to contribute to something that matters. They want leaders who are present rather than performing presence. They want organizations that treat them as human beings rather than interchangeable parts in a system that just got faster.

That is not a hospitality challenge or a healthcare challenge or a technology challenge.

That is a human challenge.

And it shows up — the same way, with the same weight, in every room I walk into regardless of what the name badge says.

If that challenge is showing up in your organization or at your event, I would welcome a conversation about whether my work might be the right fit.

Because the world does not need more performers.

It needs more people who know how to stay.

Joshua Routh is a Certified Speaking Professional, one of fewer than 100 professional sword swallowers in the world, and the author of The "S" Word: Wielding Sincerity in a World of Performance. He speaks on sincerity, collaboration, and human connection for associations, corporations, and conferences across industries. His keynotes include Complaint Free Workplace: Turning Complainers into Collaborators, The S Word: Wielding Sincerity in a World of Performance, and Wielding Humanity: Staying Human, Trusted, and Connected in the Age of AI.