“My team resents being told to use AI”

Written By Rafaela Heming

If your employees are resistant to AI, the research suggests they're not resisting the technology. They're resisting how it arrived: imposed from above, without training, with an unspoken message about what it means for their jobs. Resistance to AI is a trust problem wearing a technology costume. Treat it as change management and it moves. Treat it as stubbornness and it hardens.

I'm Rafaela Buena. Before I started teaching AI to teams in Amsterdam, I spent over a decade in internal communications, including running it across 100+ countries. I've watched a lot of technology rollouts. The pattern here is not new. The speed is.

The mood has genuinely turned

Glassdoor's economic research team tracked mentions of AI in US employee reviews. In 2019, 81% of those mentions were positive. By mid-2026, 43% were positive and 53% were negative. Mentions of AI in reviews rose 240% in a single year.

The complaints aren't mostly about job loss. Glassdoor found 20% of negative comments framed bosses as using AI as a "job killer," 14% described their workplace as "AI pushers" forcing the tech on people, 13% called it a distraction from the actual business, and 10% felt management used it to alienate workers.

MetLife's 2026 report, based on surveys of about 2,500 employees each, found 67% of HR decision-makers say AI is creating new points of friction and mistrust, even as 83% say it helps people work faster.

Faster and more distrustful, at the same time. That's the room you're leading.

Why employees resistant to AI are often right

Before fixing resistance, it's worth asking whether some of it is reasonable.

A June 2026 survey by business.com of 1,050 US workers found the most hated AI behaviours were all about AI replacing human effort rather than supporting it: shipping unchecked work, passing AI output off as your own, sending unedited AI text, trusting a chatbot over a colleague. One respondent described repeatedly correcting AI-written summaries from both staff and supervisors in her field.

If your team's experience of AI so far has been receiving worse work faster, "use it more" is not an inspiring message.

Add to that: Gallup's Q1 2026 workforce research found half of CHROs are not confident their managers can guide employees on using AI. And a 2026 Acorn survey of 1,200 professionals found 77% of executives think managers are prepared to guide AI skills, while 91% of employees say they aren't.

People are being told to adopt something their own managers can't demonstrate. Resistance is a rational response to that.

What actually reduces the resistance

From the comms side, four things.

  • Name the fear out loud. If you don't say "this is not about replacing you," people assume it is. Silence gets filled with the worst interpretation.

  • Let people choose the first task. Imposed use breeds compliance theatre. Chosen use breeds habit. Ask each person what they'd hand off if they could.

  • Show, don't announce. One manager doing a real task with AI in front of the team, badly, then better, does more than any all-hands.

  • Make it safe to be bad at it. The Glassdoor data suggests people feel pushed and judged. A room where "I don't get this" is a normal sentence changes the temperature quickly.

This is most of what a team workshop is, honestly. Not a lecture. A day where every person works on their own task, gets stuck, gets unstuck, and leaves having chosen one thing to keep doing. The resistance tends to drop the moment it stops being abstract.

What not to do

  • Don't mandate usage targets. You'll get the numbers and none of the value.

  • Don't lead with the productivity stat. Your team has read the "AI will do 40% of your job" headlines. Reciting them back is not motivation.

  • Don't skip the managers. If the people giving the instruction can't use the tool, the instruction lands as hypocrisy.

A question for Monday

Ask your team, in a channel or a meeting: "What's one thing you'd hand to AI tomorrow if you knew it wouldn't come back to bite you?" Read the answers. The word "bite" will tell you where the fear lives.

FAQ

Why are employees resistant to AI at work?

Research from Glassdoor, MetLife and others points to how AI is introduced rather than the technology itself: pushed from above, without adequate training, from managers who can't model it, and with unspoken implications about job security.

How do you get employees to adopt AI?

Let them pick the first task, show it done rather than announced, train managers before staff, and make it safe to struggle. Mandates and usage targets tend to produce compliance without value.

Is resistance to AI a generational thing?

Partly. Glassdoor found Gen Z women the most sceptical group, and some roles (writers, accountants, customer service) are consistently negative. But the strongest predictor is how AI was introduced, not age.

If the resistance in your team is getting louder, a workshop built around their real work usually does more in a day than a policy does in a quarter. I bring the comms background. Your team brings the tasks.

Sources

Rafaela Heming
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