The 5 Real Reasons Your Employees Won't Touch AI (And What to Do About Each One)
Your AI rollout is stalling, and more training isn't going to fix it.
Here's a tool that will: The Values Resistance Audit. Five questions. Takes about ten minutes. Ask yourself these questions about your team before your next AI initiative, and you'll know exactly where the resistance is coming from and what to do about it. I'll walk you through each one in this post.
The Problem Nobody Wants to Name
Let's be honest about something. The tech works. ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, or whatever your organization deploys, it actually does what it's supposed to do. The demos went great. The pilot group loved it. IT signed off. Budget approved.
And then... nothing. Or close to nothing.
A recent Gallup study found that only 33% of employees are using AI at work, even when it's available to them. More telling: just 21% say their manager has encouraged them to use it.
Two-thirds of your people have access to tools that could make their lives easier, and they're not touching them. This isn't a training problem. It's not a technology problem. It's not even, if we're being precise, a change management problem.
It's a values problem. And until you understand which values are being threatened, you're going to keep throwing training sessions at a wall that doesn't have a door.
Why Values Explain What Surveys Can't
I spend a lot of time with the Valuegraphics Database, the world's only global inventory of what actually matters to people. Over a million surveys across 152 languages. Not opinions. Not preferences. Values. The deep stuff that drives behavior, whether people are conscious of it or not.
When we look at AI resistance through this lens, patterns jump out that employee engagement surveys completely miss.
Here's what I mean. When someone tells you they're "not comfortable" with AI, that's not data. That's a symptom. The question is: which of the 56 core human values is being poked?
Let me walk you through the five most common ones we see. These aren't hypothetical. They're pulled from actual profiles of workforces wrestling with exactly this issue.
The Values Resistance Audit: Five Questions to Ask
1. Is Employment Security under threat?
Employment Security ranks 9th out of 56 values globally. That's high. When this value is activated, people will prioritize any activity that makes their job feel more secure, including avoiding the thing they think might replace them.
The tell: People who value Employment Security don't resist AI because they're lazy or technophobic. They resist it because using it feels like training their replacement.
What to do: Stop talking about efficiency gains. Start talking about how AI makes their specific expertise more valuable, not less. Show them examples of people who became more essential, not more expendable.
2. Is Personal Responsibility being bypassed?
Personal Responsibility sits at number 10. These are your "I'll handle it" people. They take pride in getting things done themselves. AI feels like cheating to them or worse, like admitting they needed help.
The tell: They'll say things like "It's faster if I just do it myself," even when it clearly isn't.
What to do: Frame AI as a tool that handles the boring parts so they can focus on the parts that actually require their judgment. They want to be the one who gets stuff done. Let them be that person, just with a better toolkit.
3. Is Trustworthiness being compromised?
Trustworthiness ranks 19th, but in certain professions, such as legal, financial services, and healthcare, it dominates. These people have built their careers on being the reliable one. The dependable one. Handing work to an AI that might hallucinate or make errors feels like a betrayal of that identity.
The tell: Excessive concern about AI mistakes, even small ones, because errors reflect on them personally.
What to do: Build in human checkpoints. Give them final approval. Make it clear that AI is the assistant and they are the expert. Their name is still on the work.
4. Is Loyalty being tested?
Loyalty sits at number 7 globally. For some people, refusing to use the new system is actually an act of loyalty to colleagues who might be displaced, to the "old way" that served them well, or to a manager who didn't ask for this change.
The tell: They were early adopters of other tools but are dragging their feet on this one. The technology isn't the variable; the social dynamics are.
What to do: Find out who they're loyal to and what they're loyal to. Then show how AI serves that loyalty rather than threatening it. If they're loyal to their team, show how it helps the whole team. If they're loyal to quality, show how it improves quality.
5. Is Security (the general kind) being rattled?
Security, not financial, not employment, just the baseline desire for a predictable life, ranks 20th. These folks don't want surprises. AI represents a whole lot of surprises, even when the surprises are good.
The tell: Questions about edge cases. "But what if..." scenarios. A need to understand every possible outcome before taking a step.
What to do: Reduce the unknowns. Pilots, sandboxes, guardrails. Let them see that the floor is solid before asking them to walk on it.
What Changes When You Get This Right
Here's where it gets interesting.
When you address resistance at the values level, adoption stops being a push and starts being a pull. People don't just comply; they actually want to use the tools because the tools now align with what matters to them.
I've seen this shift happen in rooms full of skeptical employees who walked in with arms crossed and walked out asking when they could start. The technology didn't change. The training didn't change. The framing changed.
The organizations that figure this out aren't just getting better AI adoption rates. They're building something more durable: a workforce that trusts leadership to understand them. That trust carries over into every other change initiative you'll ever run.
This is the work I do with audiences, not convincing them to use AI, but helping them see how AI fits with what already matters to them. It's also the work our research team does when organizations need to understand the specific values profile of their workforce before rolling out anything new.
But you don't need us to start. You can run The Values Resistance Audit yourself, tomorrow, before your next all-hands meeting. Five questions. Ten minutes. A completely different conversation.
The answers have been sitting there the whole time. You just needed a different set of questions.
Remember: if you know what people value, you can change what happens next.
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