Change management is hard. With AI changing our businesses, it’s also crucial. I’ve been thinking about change management lately through the lens of “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath. If you haven’t read it, the book uses a powerful metaphor: Our rational mind is the Rider, and our emotional side is the Elephant. The Rider can guide the elephant, but if there’s a disagreement, the Elephant will always win.

And right now, when it comes to AI, we have a very anxious Elephant on our hands.

The Elephant in the Room

The leaders of Silicon Valley seem to be tripping over themselves to claim the number of jobs AI has replaced. It doesn’t matter that these claims don’t have a lot of merit and seem more like a cover for profit-driven layoffs than the advancements of their AI Agents they’d like to sell you. The message employees are hearing loud and clear? “We’re coming for your job, and we’re excited about it.”

Is it any wonder the Elephant is spooked?

We try to calm things down with phrases like “AI won’t take your job, someone who uses AI will.” But honestly? That’s such a shallow appeal. It’s fear-based motivation, increasing the fear they are already feeling. It’s telling people they’re in a race against their coworkers rather than working together toward something meaningful. It’s Rider language trying to motivate an Elephant, and it’s just not working.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

The truth is your AI initiative will fail without employee buy-in. An MIT study recently found that 95% of company AI projects are not seeing any ROI. There are many reasons for the failures, but it’s important to remember that successful AI adoption depends entirely on employees sharing their knowledge and expertise. In fact, that same report showed that “shadow AI,” where employees’ use of their personal AI tools is delivering substantial productivity gains. We need people to document what they know, to train these systems, and to make their hard-won insights visible and shareable if we want them to work on a company level.

But think about what we’re asking: When someone sees AI as a threat to their livelihood, we’re essentially asking them to train their replacement. The Elephant is nervous because it’s being asked to dig its own grave. No wonder we’re seeing resistance and use of AI primarily for personal productivity.

A Different Way Forward

What if we completely reframed this conversation?

Instead of “adapt or die,” what if we showed how AI could increase the time you had to focus on relationships, to build things you care about or move your goals forward?

Think about it. Nobody got into a data career because they loved data entry, analytics to format excel sheets, data science because they love cleaning data, or programming because they liked writing boilerplate. Yet, that’s what a lot of the day in those jobs looks like. But relationships? Creative problem-solving? Mentoring? Strategic thinking? That’s the stuff that makes work meaningful.

The organizations that will thrive with AI are the ones that get this emotional reality. They’re:

• Being specific about how AI augments human work rather than replacing it
• Celebrating the uniquely human skills (and the people) that become more valuable with AI
• Creating early wins where employees experience AI making their own work lives better

It’s About Relationships (It Always Is)

This all comes down to trust. Employees need to believe that investing in AI capability won’t backfire on them. You have to mean it. Vague promises about upskilling aren’t enough. AI can process data, generate text and identify patterns. But it can’t build trust with a nervous client. It can’t mentor someone through a career crisis. It can’t read the room in a tense negotiation or celebrate with a team after landing a huge project.

These human capabilities are more important than ever. And the organizations that understand this will use AI to amplify these strengths:

• Using AI to prep better for client meetings so you can focus on connection. This can include things like summarizing their experiences across various systems like support or project management so that you have a full picture of the good and the bad they’ve faced.
• Leveraging AI to better align teams and make sure communication is flowing (but not overwhelming).
• Having AI surface multiple possible solutions that spark creative human thinking and allow us to explore a solution space with its various trade-offs before making a final decision.

Moving the Elephant

The path forward isn’t about conquering our emotional resistance to AI. It’s about honoring those emotions and addressing them honestly. Your Elephant isn’t being irrational when it’s nervous about AI. It’s pattern-matching based on what it’s seeing and hearing. As leaders, we can’t override emotion with logic, we must create an environment where both the Rider and the Elephant want to move in the same direction.

Most of all, it’s the right thing to do. We can make AI about human flourishing, not human replacement. We can turn people into our competitive advantage by remembering that business is about relationships between people. That’s something no AI can replace.

The question isn’t whether we’ll adopt AI. It’s whether we’ll do it in a way that honors the Elephant, and the humans, in the room.