Your Team Is Copying How You Use AI

Last week, I spent a full day teaching AI inside a California company with a highly engaged team.

People volunteered real work. We built examples on the spot. Employees shared their screens. The leaders were already using AI and talking about it openly, so everyone else had permission to experiment.

I have also taught a company where the session happened on Zoom, cameras stayed off, leadership barely participated, and some leaders openly expressed skepticism.

Same technology. Two rooms. Completely different results.

Your employees copy what you do with AI, not what you say about it.

Silent Resistance Is Already Here

A 2026 survey of 2,400 knowledge workers found that 29% admitted to sabotaging their company’s AI strategy. Among Gen Z employees, the number jumped to 44%. Of the people who admitted to sabotage, 30% said they feared AI would take their job. Fortune reported the findings here.

Sabotage does not always look dramatic. It can mean refusing company-approved tools, using unapproved tools without approval, entering private information into public systems, or deliberately producing weak work to make AI look ineffective.

I have watched this resistance change in real time.

One team member told me she was concerned about the moral, ethical, and environmental impact of AI. After the workshop, she saw the technology differently. Another employee had been notoriously anti-AI a few months earlier. He is now one of the company’s main AI champions.

Both started skeptical. Both needed a leader who made it safe to learn.

Your Team Is Doing the Math

Think about the messages most employees hear:

“Use AI to get more done.”

“People who don’t adapt will get left behind.”

A smart employee hears those lines and thinks, “If I get faster, I’ll be expected to produce more work. Or I’ll train my replacement. Either way, I lose.”

That fear is fair. Address it before it hardens into resistance.

Tell people where the saved time will go. Some of it should eliminate repetitive work nobody likes doing. Some should improve quality. Some should create room for better thinking, growth, and the work only a human can do. Some should give the team more time to celebrate wins together in person.

AI adoption becomes easier when employees can see how the change improves their own work and life, not only the company’s numbers.

Model the Behavior First

Be your company’s first AI champion.

Use AI in front of your team on a real task. Show the prompt. Show the messy first draft. Show how you corrected it. Let people see the judgment behind the finished work.

When a leader experiments openly, employees gain permission to experiment too.

Then recruit more champions. Share AI and automation wins in a weekly huddle. Reward the builders who test a useful idea, document what worked, and teach someone else.

Finally, name the fear out loud. I told one room:

“A lot of people are scared AI will take their job. By the end of today, you will happily think, ‘Hell yeah! AI will take my job!’ Because AI allows us to multiply what we can do, giving us more freedom, more growth opportunities, and more humanity.”

Then I gave them the sharper version:

“AI will come for your job unless you come for AI first.”

Every role has work that drains time without using much human judgment. Start there. Let AI take the repetitive part so the person can become more valuable, more creative, and more capable.

Turn Skepticism Into Useful Questions

People sometimes ask an outside trainer questions they would never ask their boss. That distance creates room for honesty. Leaders hear the real objections, employees get practical answers, and the team can agree on responsible boundaries together.

You can start without an outside trainer. Ask your team three questions:

1. Which part of your work drains the most time?
2. What worries you most about using AI here?
3. Where should the saved time go if we improve this process?

Those answers give you a practical pilot and a trust plan at the same time.

The technology matters. Leadership behavior decides whether people use it.

Your team is watching.

Want the original issue that inspired this article? Read King’s Keys #31: Silent Sabotage.

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