Best of: What leaders get wrong about AI rollouts and employee adoption

In the wake of more layoffs attributed to "AI," we thought it worthwhile to revisit this conversation from earlier in the year. Increasingly, AI is being used as a catch-all excuse to justify layoffs without clear return on business value, other than the stock price...so it's time to dig deeper.

What if your AI rollout isn't failing because of the technology, but because no one asked your employees how they feel about it?

Dr. Marissa Alert is a clinical psychologist who works with organizations scaling AI. Her argument is deceptively simple: the resistance leaders keep running into isn't a change management problem. It's a diagnostic failure. And until you treat it like one, AI rollouts turn into guesswork.

High usage doesn't mean successful adoption. It might just mean fear-driven compliance.

In this episode, we get into what business leaders and organizations consistently get wrong: the assumptions made about how employees will respond, the gap between leadership alignment at the top and the confusion that trickles down, and why layering an AI mandate onto a workforce already running on empty is a very different problem than a training rollout.

We also got into something harder: what it means when employees are being asked to integrate tools that might replace them, and why most leaders don't have a good answer for that question.

If your organization is tracking adoption rates and still seeing 20%, this episode is worth your time.

Mentioned

* Jack Dorsey's Block cuts nearly half of its staff in AI gamble [https://www.theverge.com/tech/885710/jack-dorsey-block-layoffs-job-cuts-ai]