Who Bears the Cost and Who Benefits
People rarely resist change because they dislike change. They resist when they conclude that the benefits will go to someone else while they carry the costs.
That argument comes from Fiona Hill’s work on communities that lost their industrial base, and it applies directly to AI inside a business.¹ The central adoption risk is not the technology. It is creating a group of people who feel that decisions are being made about them rather than with them.
Consider how people will interpret the following announcement. “AI will make us more efficient” is heard, reasonably, as “we will need fewer people.” Nobody in the room says that out loud. They go back to their desks, work out what it might mean for them, and quietly decide how much help they intend to be.
Owner-managed companies hold a real advantage here that large corporations do not. You are close enough to your people to bring them into the process rather than announcing conclusions to them. You know their names, their circumstances and what they are good at. That closeness is an asset, and most owners underuse it.
Using it well means being specific about three things. Where do the gains go? If the answer is capacity to take on more work without adding people, say that. If part of it is margin, say that too, and say what the margin funds. What happens to the time that gets freed? “Higher-value work” means nothing until you can name the work. And how do people participate in the process of planning where AI is integrated into the business? Someone who helped decide where AI would be applied is in a very different relationship with the result than someone who was told about it afterward.
Be clear that change is coming. Some roles will be restructured, usually eliminating lower-value repetitive and administrative work and refocusing on complex and challenging activities. Almost everyone will need to adapt. Most people will need to learn new skills, and some people may end up in very different roles than they are serving in today.
People can handle a difficult message when it is delivered truthfully. What they cannot handle is vagueness because it leaves them to imagine the worst version of what may unfold.
Source
¹ Fiona Hill, There Is Nothing for You Here (2021). The application to AI adoption is the author’s.