You think your team is on board with AI. They feel something else.

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Hey Spark Family,

I sat with an executive recently who was genuinely encouraged by how her organization was adapting to AI.

Adoption was up. Nobody was pushing back. The tools were getting used.

She had every reason to feel good about it.

Then I spent time with her team.

They were using the tools. They were also quietly wondering what it meant that a system could now do the part of their job they were most proud of.

Not one of them had said that out loud.

Not because they did not trust her exactly.

Because "I am worried this makes me unnecessary" is a very hard sentence to say to the person who decides whether you are.

That gap is the story right now. And the data on it is striking.

The Research Is Clear

New research from BCG, published in Harvard Business Review, should stop every senior leader in their tracks.

What the data shows:

➡ 76% of executives say their people feel enthusiastic about AI. Only 31% of employees actually do.

➡ 75% of executives believe their company is employee-centric. Just 23% of employees agree.

Leaders are more than twice off the mark about the people they see every day.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast shows where that anxiety actually sits.

➡ Frontline leaders are 3X more likely than executives to be concerned about AI.

The people closest to the work are the most worried. The people furthest from it are the most confident.

And then DDI found the number that tells you what to do about it.

➡ Leaders who trust their senior leaders are 2.2X more likely to feel excited about AI.

➡ Organizations where senior leaders build that trust meet 2.8X less resistance to AI.

So the thing most likely to determine whether AI works in your organization is not your technology.

It is whether your people trust you enough to tell you the truth about it.

Here is what makes that even more interesting.

McKinsey indexed roughly 10,500 skills by how exposed each one is to automation.

• Most exposed: coding, accounting, quality control. The structured work.
• Least exposed: resilience, influence, and empathy.

Read those three again. Those are the trust-building skills.

The one thing AI cannot do for you is the exact thing your AI rollout depends on.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The leaders getting this wrong are rarely the ones who do not care.

They are usually the ones who asked, got a reasonable answer, and believed it.

I see the leader who read silence as buy-in. Nobody objected in the meeting, so the rollout is going well.

I see the team member who is genuinely good with the new tools and genuinely unsettled by them, and has decided the second part is not safe to mention.

I see the leader tracking adoption metrics that look excellent, with no visibility into what those numbers are costing the people generating them.

Adoption is not the same as trust.

People will use what you give them and still be quietly working out whether they have a future here.

That is what a 76 and a 31 look like from the inside.

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What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When I work with leaders on this, I ask one question first.

Not how adoption is going.

What would someone on your team have to believe about you to tell you they are scared?

Because that is the whole game. People do not volunteer the fear. They test whether it is safe first.

The leaders who close this gap do three things:

1. They go first
​They name what they do not know about where this is heading. Certainty you do not have does not build trust. Honesty does.

2. They ask about the feeling, not the workflow
​Not "how is the tool working." Try "what part of your work would you hate to hand over?" That question gets you a real answer.

3. They connect the change to the person's future
​People can absorb enormous uncertainty about the work. What they cannot absorb is uncertainty about whether they still matter.

None of that requires you to be an AI expert.

Your people were never waiting for that.

⭐ Leadership Challenge

Before your week gets moving, think of one person on your team by name.

Then ask yourself:

• How do they actually feel about what AI is changing in their work?
• Have I ever asked in a way that made an honest answer safe?
• What have they stopped bringing me since this shift started?

And the hardest one:

If they were worried about their future here, would they tell me?

Your people are not waiting for you to master the technology.

They are waiting to find out whether they can tell you the truth while everything moves.

That has always been the work.

It is just finally the only work that cannot be handed to anything else.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – If someone on your team came to mind while reading this, trust that instinct. The conversation costs you fifteen minutes. The silence costs considerably more. ✨

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