What to Do When Employees Resist AI Tools

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. AI leaders outperform laggards, but people and processes often get in the way of AI adoption.
2. Employee acceptance of AI is essential to seeing positive ROI.
3. To drive employee acceptance, look for work tasks with high impact but low satisfaction. Fix them by making them better for workers.
4. To address fears of job loss, open lines of communication and remember that AI changes the nature of work your employees will do.

A lot of media reports on AI focus on the technology itself: what it is, what it can do, etc. But when it comes to getting business value from AI, business leaders agree that the biggest challenges lie not in technical implementation but in people and processes.

In fact, per new BCG research, 48 percent noted that employee resistance – and even fear – of AI tools was a major hurdle preventing them from a positive ROI.

But AI remains a top priority for many firms – as it should. Recent research from BCG shows that the leaders in AI adoption enjoy 50 percent higher revenue, 60 percent higher shareholder returns, 40 percent greater return on invested capital, and even higher levels of employee satisfaction than laggards.

So how can you overcome employee resistance to new AI tools? The key is to monitor the tool’s impact and potential resistance points, then address them as they come up. In this piece, we’ll explain how to do that.

Background: Why Employee Acceptance Matters in AI Transformations

Before we dive into how to get employees to embrace AI tools, it’s worth reiterating why that’s worth doing. AI, as we’ve noted before, is not like other digital transformations. Because AI is a bottom-up technology, it requires user acceptance to make an impact.

In other words: it doesn’t matter how powerful the tool in question is. If your employees don’t use it, it won’t improve your bottom line.

That’s a problem for innovation leads and others championing AI internally: fully half of CFOs will cut funding for an AI project if it doesn’t have a positive ROI within a year.

So getting employees on board matters. A lot.

To do that, leaders first have to understand the two most common reasons employees resist AI:

1. The AI tool doesn’t help them do their work.
2. They’re afraid the AI will cause them to lose their job.

Let’s take a look at how to address both.

How to Boost Employee Acceptance by Ensuring AI Is Helping, Not Hurting

Let’s zoom out for a minute. The promise of AI tools is to automate specific tasks so that humans no longer have to do them. The result of adopting an AI tool, then, should be an increase in productivity.

Where this goes wrong in practice is in the failure to recognize the larger context AI tools exist within. For example, many organizations approach AI investments from the top down: the biz dev team is an important one to the bottom line, so we’ll find an AI tool with biz dev applications.

This approach is totally backwards for a bottom-up transformation. Why? Because if the AI tool in question doesn’t address an area where the biz dev team is experiencing work friction (aka hurdles to getting work done created by people, processes, or technology), they won’t use it.

Worse, if the tool doesn’t sync well with the other software the team is using, they may simply find workarounds so they can keep doing their work.

So what’s the solution?

If you’ve already adopted an AI tool…

• Survey workers about how the tool impacts specific tasks they complete during their days (e.g., adding a lead to the pipeline, following up on a lead, scheduling a meeting, etc.).
• Create a prioritization matrix, plotting each task by its impact and employee satisfaction with it.
• Look for areas with high impact and low satisfaction: those are your problem areas. Troubleshoot them (e.g. by reconfiguring the AI tool), and you’ll solve your AI acceptance problem.

If you haven’t yet adopted an AI tool…

• Perform the same task as above.
• When you’ve identified problem areas, look for ways to solve those problems.
• Note that, in some cases, the solution might lie within a tool you already have, meaning your AI investment dollars can be better used elsewhere (for a different team or different task).

What to Do When Employees Are Scared for Their Jobs

Now let’s address the elephant in the room. When we talk about increasing productivity, it’s possible to interpret that as doing the same amount of work with fewer human workers.

Whatever your plans for AI, communication is key.

One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that AI tools at this point are largely experimental. That is, most organizations don’t yet know what the outcome of adopting AI will be.

When they’re most successful, AI tools will not only improve productivity; they’ll also change the nature of employees’ work. Take a call center, for example: if AI agents become the norm for handling the simple calls that come in, the work that call center employees do will be more complex and nuanced. It will require different training and different resources.

This is something that’s happened throughout history as new technologies emerged: think of telephone operators. The telecommunications industry barely employs any human operators today, but it’s still an enormous industry with many jobs that didn’t exist 100 or even 50 years ago.

And then there’s another consideration: about half of employees today report being on an overwhelmed team. For many organizations, adding AI won’t make human workers any less necessary, it will simply let them get their jobs done in a way that’s simply not possible without AI resources.

Overcome Employee Resistance to Drive Positive ROI on AI Investments

Employees resist AI when it doesn’t help them complete their work and when they fear it will replace them entirely. That hurts the entire organization’s ability to reap the benefits of this transformational technology.

Organizations that reframe their assessment of AI to its impact on individual employee tasks will be the most successful in both driving employee acceptance and enjoying a positive ROI. As they find more and more compelling AI applications, these organizations will free up resources they can dedicate to new initiatives, positioning themselves to outcompete their competitors.

If you’d like support overcoming employee resistance to AI initiatives, don’t hesitate to get in touch.