Stop Asking Employees to Adopt AI

Organizations are facing an urgent change management challenge. Leaders are convinced that artificial intelligence (AI) will transform their business, yet the people needed to carry that transformation forward have stopped trying, or so it appears. According to McKinsey’s Superagency in the Workplace report, employees are already using generative AI three times more than their leaders realize. Yet only 1 percent of companies say AI is fully integrated into how work gets done. Workers are moving. Organizations aren't. Much of that activity, as we'll see, is happening outside approved systems entirely—less a sign of resistance than a signal of unmet need.

We've seen this pattern across industries from both sides—Tomer as chief customer officer at WalkMe, on the frontlines of digital adoption, and Jenny as an executive coach and organizational change consultant. What looks like resistance is usually a rational response to a system that changed at the top without bringing people along. Leaders who close the gap don’t begin by tightening control. They begin by resetting the system. Here are three strategies to do it.

FIRST, UNDERSTAND WHY EMPLOYEES RESIST

When employees disengage from AI, we call it resistance. WalkMe’s State of Digital Adoption Survey tells a more nuanced story. A 52-point trust chasm separates executives and workers: 61 percent of executives trust AI for complex decisions; only 9 percent  of workers do. According to McKinsey’s State of AI Survey, while 88 percent of organizations use AI in at least one business function, nearly two‑thirds are still running pilots rather than scaling. Leaders believe the tools are working. Employees are living a different reality. These are not two sides of the same conversation. They are two different belief systems.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.