Why Employees Resist AI - Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

Your gut is the wrong guide for rolling out AI to your team. Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts and author of The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press), tells Jeremy Rivera why owners get excited about AI while their employees get anxious, and how a small business closes that gap. Read the full episode recap.

Gleb is a behavioral scientist who runs an eight-person consulting firm and works mainly across the US, Canada and the UK. He opens with the research he cites on why rollouts stall: MIT found 95% of AI initiatives fail to scale, and Pew found 52% of people are more anxious than excited about AI tools, with only 9% more excited than anxious. Owners tend to sit in that 9%. Their teams usually don't.

In this episode

• The empathy gap - the owner shows off a cool demo, and the team hears "this will replace me."
• Group dynamics over the tool - Gleb points to McKinsey research where 80% report individual productivity from AI, but only about 6% of businesses see a material bottom-line impact.
• AI workslop as quiet resistance - polished output with problems inside. The Stanford and BetterUp Labs study he cites, covered in Harvard Business Review, found 40% of respondents received workslop in the past month, and each instance took about two hours to fix.
• Why AI is not a CRM rollout - you can't stand over someone's shoulder or run an IT-led implementation, because each person customizes their own "executive assistant."
• Three profiles, three fixes - for AI alarmists, commit to growth over job cuts, and make it clear the people who use AI well are the ones who stay.
• Go slow to go fast with pragmatic resistors - survey the tasks people hate and what blocks the work they love, then build prompts and agent skeletons for those first, the same idea behind a Claude skill that does your pre-work.
• Leadership modeling for reluctant adopters - talk about your own AI use, open a Slack or Teams channel for use cases, and reward the best one each month.

Chapters

• (00:00) Meet Dr. Gleb Tsipursky of Disaster Avoidance Experts
• (00:22) His new book and why AI rollouts fail to scale
• (02:18) The empathy gap between leaders and employees
• (04:45) Group dynamics, not the technology
• (06:42) The cool demo that scares your team
• (07:40) AI workslop as a form of resistance
• (09:11) Does culture change AI adoption?
• (11:23) Why AI is not a CRM rollout
• (13:57) The three psychographic profiles
• (19:27) AI alarmists: commit to growth and flip the script
• (22:38) Pragmatic resistors: go slow to go fast
• (24:57) Reluctant adopters: leadership modeling
• (27:19) Eating his own dog food
• (29:05) Ownership mindset and why resistance is rational
• (33:01) Wrap-up

Notable quotes

"The leader needs to understand that her or his gut does not lead to the right outcome with AI adoption because their gut emotions, their intuitions are at odds with the emotions of their employees." - Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

"AI is showing individual productivity, but the group dynamics is where it's at. And that's not the technology." - Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

"It's not by using AI tools that you'll be replaced. It's that if you don't learn how to use AI effectively, you won't really stick around here." - Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

Jeremy brings up his conversation with Keith Perhac of SegMetrics about AI adoption in Japan, and Gleb compares the US with other countries. For more owners on what is working, read what real founders are actually doing with AI. Gleb's earlier book, ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators, came out in January 2023. The new one is available from Georgetown University Press.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera.