Lens Three — Solving the Problem of the Laggards
Author’s note: This is Part 3 of Going Beyond AI: Six Lenses on Building a Transformation-Ready Organization. If you missed Lens 1, read it here.
What if the biggest barrier to AI adoption in your organization is a silent reset happening inside your team every single quarter? Two people look at the same new AI model. One asks, “What tedious task could this replace for me today?” The other asks, “Are we even allowed to use this?”
The second person is an AI laggard. Let’s unpack what that really means.
Decades ago, sociologist Everett Rogers mapped how innovations spread. He found that roughly the last 16% of any population holds out until the old way of doing things completely disappears (Rogers, 1962). In traditional technology cycles, that transition took years.
With AI, the shift happens every quarter.
An AI laggard is anyone whose way of working resets to zero every time the technology moves. Even the early adopter who mastered last year’s tool and then stopped learning quietly joins the laggard curve today. They want the terrain to stop moving before they invest the mental energy. Good luck with that.
Meet Dave
Dave runs a mid-sized team, and in nine years he’s learned where every piece of data is buried in the CRM. When the system breaks, everyone goes to Dave.
Last spring, leadership rolled out AI licenses, sent the hyped all-hands email, and catered the lunch-and-learn. Dave gave it a shot and asked for a summary of a major client account. The AI confidently reported the company was founded in 1987. Dave knows it was 2011. He smirked, closed the tab, and hasn’t logged back in since.
One bad output became a permanent verdict, and it gave Dave the permission he was looking for. If the tool is flawed, his nine years of knowledge keep their premium.
Every company has a Dave. Some have an entire floor of them.
Picture the Daves in your office right now: the people who tried it once, caught a glitch, and permanently folded their arms. Have you been a Dave lately?
The Three Flavors of Resistance
It’s easy to do. But as a manager, you can’t treat your Daves as a monolith. Resistance comes in three flavors, and applying the wrong fix to the wrong one digs the stubbornness in deeper.
Fearful Dave sits quietly at his desk, running the math on his job security and hating the answer. He watches AI draft in 10 seconds the quarterly report that takes him three days of deep focus. His internal monologue: “I’m going to be unemployed by Christmas.” No lunch-and-learn wins over someone afraid for his livelihood, because you’re asking him to dig his own grave. The fix is vision. Map out where he lands on the other side of the transition. Sit him down and show him the new job description, where his role moves from task doer to strategic reviewer. He stops writing one report a week, directs AI to produce ten, and his value becomes analyzing them. If he can’t see his future, self-preservation will make him fight you tooth and nail.
Skeptical Dave has a point. 41% of workers report AI output that looked finished but needed significant rework. Insist the tool is flawless and you lose all credibility. Instead, make him the quality gate for the team’s AI output. He’s already scrutinizing it for free. Now he’s in the tool daily, and his skepticism calibrates as the models improve.
Quietly Hostile Dave is the smiling assassin. He nods in every meeting, says the rollout is going great, then changes nothing and waits for the next shiny initiative. His resistance runs on plausible deniability, so take that away. Set a deadline: by Friday, these client workflows run through the new platform. Now it’s comply or openly refuse.
Only 28% of companies have CEO oversight of AI governance, and only 28% of employees get active support from their manager. When the CEO hands AI off to IT, everyone down the line learns they can wait it out. Dave notices.
When the map resets every 90 days, the person who memorized the old one loses to the person willing to read the new one.
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
Why do employees resist AI at work?
Usually because they are making a rational calculation about job security. Resistance is a response to perceived risk rather than a knowledge gap, which is why training alone rarely resolves it.
What are the types of AI resistance in the workplace?
Three common patterns: fearful employees who believe the technology threatens their role, skeptical employees who have seen previous transformations abandoned, and quietly hostile employees who believe the output quality is worse.
Do AI mandates work?
Rarely. Mandates produce compliance, which registers as adoption in usage dashboards while the underlying work stays cautious and unchanged.
How much does manager support affect AI adoption?
Substantially. Gallup found in May 2025 that employees with active manager support were 2.1 times more likely to use AI, 6.5 times more likely to find the tools useful, and 8.8 times more likely to report doing their best work.
How many employees have manager support for AI?
Only 28 percent, according to Gallup research fielded in May 2025 across 19,043 U.S. employees.
What happened with Duolingo’s AI-first announcement?
Duolingo announced an AI-first direction in late April 2025, wiped its TikTok and Instagram accounts within a month amid backlash, and its CEO publicly clarified on 28 May 2025 that AI was not replacing what employees do.
How do you talk to an employee who refuses to use AI?
Ask what they are protecting rather than presenting a case for the technology. The answer usually identifies the real obstacle, which is rarely the tool itself.
Should you force employees to use AI?
No. The larger risk is not the individual holdout but the majority watching how the holdout is treated and drawing conclusions about what happens to people who struggle.
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