When corporate leaders introduce AI to employees, they often face employee skepticism and use Colgate-Palmolive and Mac to deal with AI pushback using employee feedback and data.
When Colgate-Palmolive leaders were ready to deploy an AI hub for their employees this summer, they knew exactly what they wanted to avoid. A small group that knows the best use cases for each department and implements AI strategies assuming they push AI systems to the rest of the organization.
This kind of approach “puts a bad taste in people’s mouths” and “creates a huge amount of friction,” says Kli Pappas, senior director of global predictive analytics and head of AI at Colgate-Palmolive.
Instead of a top-down approach, the company created an internal hub. This hub allows anyone in your organization to build a personalized AI assistant and enter natural language with instructions to solve inefficient processes in your daily work.
Colgate’s strategy avoided employee pushback, hesitation or resistance, one of the biggest barriers companies face when hiring AI.
David Hilborn, managing partner at consulting firm West Monroe Partners, said how employees change the change in AI implementation is “arguably the toughest part.” Because Hilborn is the company’s organization, people, and change practice leader, companies often fail to spend enough resources to implement the changes or lack a clear game plan to manage the people’s side of AI initiatives.
“It always leads to a failed adoption,” Hilborn said. “Leaders have to think about the dimensions of people.”
Big unknown: How AI affects me
Hillborn said employee resistance to AI is usually due to lack of understanding. If employees don’t know how technology works or how they change expectations for their role, they often worry about losing control of responsibility or even being expelled from work.
Managers sometimes don’t fully understand AI themselves, creating “sloppy leader support” and sowetting huge uncertainty among teams, said Hilborn.
Without communication plans, clear expectations for role changes and the ability to provide feedback, employees will be left exhausted by technology overhauls when Tarja Stephens, founder of business consultancy AI, is told to “change fatigue.”
“They don’t want to innovate, they don’t make it clear how AI implementation will affect their role,” Stevens said.
We Rent Mac, a company that provides access to Apple devices, but in 2023 they launched an AI-driven inventory management system. However, Luca Dal Zotto, co-founder of Rent A Mac, said he made the mistake of publishing the AI program prematurely without providing sufficient training or context to its employees.
“Anxiety filled the space,” Dal Zotto said.
Staff feared losing their jobs, and others questioned the accuracy of the technology. Three departments – customer support, procurement and warehouse management – resisted AI and used it in dissatisfaction. Dal Zotto said implementation would be delayed by seven weeks and would cost around $85,000 to save on expected efficiency.
Hilborn has seen instances like this. In this case, AI implementations don’t work and the leaders need to “go back to the drawings.” “It’s very, very, very, very expensive.”
Creating AI about people
Looking at the resistance, Mac changed its approach. We have identified “AI champions” within the organization. Employees “reduce peer anxiety” trained with AI, which can demonstrate the tangible benefits of technology, says Dal Zotto. For example, warehouse crews discovered that AI systems reduce order processing times by 37%.
The revised AI strategy has rented Mac employee engagement with automated systems from 31% to 89% in three months. Currently, the program creates about three-quarters of inventory decisions, freeing employees to manage exceptions and caring for customer service.
Dal Zotto said the biggest lesson he learned is that deploying AI requires investment in technology strategies and people’s strategies.
Beyond IT departments AI
Although each company’s approaches vary, Stephens generally recommends several steps to implement AI in a person-centered way. Keep the stories about Job’s enhancement unexchanged. Set clear expectations about how that will affect people’s roles. Have employees experiment and provide feedback.
In developing AI strategies, Colgate-Palmolive reviewed the company’s values and code of conduct regarding workplace culture.
“Everyone should be able to decide for themselves how AI will affect their work and their work,” Papas said.
The company’s AI hub focuses on job-specific use cases, such as sorting data and writing copies, rather than technology like AI model types, allowing employees to build AI assistants that suit their needs. Colgate tells the employee to think about it, as if he’s providing instructions to the intern.
“You don’t need to know anything about genai,” Papas said.
After launching the hub in July, employees built around 3,000 AI assistants in the second half of 2024.
Pappas said they have built AI assistants to help marketing employees create brand copies. Team members, along with their AI assistants, wrote thousands of lines of programming languages, reducing the year’s worth of work to two months.
Rather than using AI to identify equipment problems, receiving error codes and searching for solutions manually, manufacturing factory workers explain the solutions in their local language.
“There are so many little days where AI is good at helping people,” Papas said. “Everyone gets value from it in their own way.”
