Fortune reports that at a summit for business executives, clinical health psychologist Deepika Chopra shifted the focus of AI discussions from the technology itself to the people using it. She believes that the hesitation and slowdown that companies experience in advancing AI is often not simply a matter of execution.
Resistance is not necessarily opposition.
She pointed out that management often views team misunderstandings, stagnation, or lack of cooperation as "resistance to change." However, in many cases, employees are simply in a highly uncertain environment. Faced with the unknown, people rely more on familiar practices, their risk tolerance decreases, and their thinking space shrinks.
According to her, this does not equate to a lack of capability, nor does it necessarily mean deliberate delay. Many companies, after encountering obstacles in AI implementation, will continue to increase investment in training, communication, and change management, but if the problem is misjudged, these investments may not address the core issues.
Employees care more about whether they still have value.
Chopra said that when she talks to clients, she often hears not just simple concerns about job safety, but more fundamental questions: Are they still important? Will their contributions still be needed? Where can they create value in the future?
She believes that these kinds of questions are not fundamentally technical issues, but rather human ones. If companies only view AI deployment as a task of process transformation and efficiency improvement, they may overlook the sense of value that employees care about most, thus allowing internal resistance to persist.
She offered three suggestions for response.
She outlined three approaches at the meeting: provide clear information whenever possible, help teams build resilience, and don't ignore employees' judgments about meaning and contribution. She emphasized that employees aren't incapable of handling uncertainty; what they truly struggle with is chaos.
In terms of specific methods, she suggested that the team simultaneously consider the worst-case, most likely, and best-case scenarios, and then discuss their respective responses. She believes that the focus of this approach is not on predicting the future, but rather on training the team's ability to adapt to change.
