AI Can’t Transform Your Company
Last month, we emphasized the importance of storytelling for leadership. This time, we narrow our focus to the narrative – or lack thereof – surrounding AI. A recent article in Fortune lays out the brute facts: half of the 1,000+ surveyed employees “described themselves as actively resisting new AI tools.” Only 16% “believe the company is adopting AI for genuine business value rather than hype or competitive pressure.” How can this technology, which promises to transform the economy, face so much resistance?
Noted economist Kyla Scanlon ran an anonymous poll one year ago, surveying 1,200+ individuals. She found that in many industries, a majority of respondents reported no trust in their employers on AI.
And trust starts with a coherent story.
Consider this company we observed. Leadership knew AI was important, but didn’t quite know how. They brought in expensive consultants to “do AI,” which practically meant showing up in the office in the hopes that employees would book hours with them for tips and tricks. This worked, but only to an extent. What could have been different?
Name the Villain: When leadership says “Everybody! Use AI!” the technology becomes the villain. It is the thing that may take your job, or at the very least, the latest distraction that comes from management. The proper way to frame AI is to name the obstacles to the company’s growth as the villain: workflow inefficiencies, lack of data, unclear growth paths, etc. These are pain points that everybody feels and hopes to resolve.
Name the Triumph: AI usage is not an end in itself, but rather a tool to vanquish these pain points. Instead of people logging into Claude and ChatGPT to generate slop-riddled decks, the team is now focused on tackling day-to-day business challenges.
Write the Happily Ever After: Articulate what the company looks like after the AI fulfills its transformative promise. This description demonstrates to the team that there will be a payoff to the experimentation. It shows that technology will be used to expand the business, not reduce headcount.
Can you imagine a company that does not run on computers? As absurd as it sounds, during the late 1980s and 1990s, the country’s top thinkers fiercely debated their impact on productivity. What economists discovered was that the technology itself was only as good as the organizational change surrounding it. Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin M. Hitt wrote nearly 30 years ago that “The unmistakable lesson was that purchasing computerized equipment was the smallest part of the overall cost of creating a new manufacturing system. The biggest costs were in changing the organization.”
What was true for computers is true for ChatGPT. AI can spur a company to transform itself, but it cannot be the transformation. And changing oneself starts with getting the story right.
