Employees aren’t resisting AI—they’re resisting fear

Across all industries, an unmistakable tension is building inside of organizations as artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded into how work gets done. In my conversations with leaders, one observation has surfaced with striking consistency: employees aren’t simply resisting learning AI—they’re treating it as an existential threat. As one senior executive recently explained it: “our people are slow-walking AI because they fear they are ‘training their replacement.’” It’s hard to blame them when we consider what employees are seeing around them. Across the business landscape, companies are scaling up AI even as they reduce staff. Oracle recently ended the employment of 20,000 to 30,000 skilled and tenured employees in a massive one-day termination event. In late April, Meta laid off roughly 8,000 workers, with CEO Marc Zuckerberg directly attributing the reductions to rising AI capital spending. “We basically have two major cost centers in the company: compute infrastructure and people-oriented things,” he said. “If we’re investing more in one area . . . that means we have less capital to allocate to the other. So that means we do need to take down the size of the company somewhat.” Needless to say, the very companies building the future of AI are sending a clear signal to other CEOs and CFOs: heavy investment in their technology will be rewarded with smaller workforces. These examples alone make it rather hard for workers to believe NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang, who has repeatedly said that “it is unlikely most people will lose a job to AI. It is most likely that most people will lose their job to somebody who uses AI.” And Gallup confirms nearly one-in-four workers already believe their current careers will be eliminated within the next five years. A clear sign of employee resistance is the simple fact that only 13% of American workers use AI every day, and just 28% use it even a few times a week. How Leaders Can Better Support AI Adoption