.png)
93% of organisations have adopted AI and are seeing almost no return on it. The explanation Paul Hamilton and Dr Tatijana Busic put forward is not a technology problem: dropping a powerful new tool into a workplace does not mean anybody will use it, and 31% of employees are actively sabotaging AI strategies from the inside.
Who is on this episode
Paul Hamilton is Director of National Talent Attraction Strategy at KPMG Canada, with over two decades in HR across Microsoft, LCBO and KPMG. Dr Tatijana Busic is a clinical and organisational psychologist and the co-creator of The Inner Edge, a leadership programme. Between them they cover the two halves of the same problem: what leaders do, and what happens in the brains of the people they are asking to change.
What they covered
A treadmill metaphor runs through the whole episode and does a lot of work. You can install the best treadmill available and nobody is obliged to run on it. That is the shape of most AI rollouts, and it reframes the return question away from licence counts and towards whether anyone actually changed how they work.
Paul's contribution to the vocabulary is the automation ceiling, the point above which human judgement, empathy and relational intelligence stop being replaceable. He also tells a story from his time with Frank Clegg at Microsoft that reframes what leadership looks like at half past five in the evening, which is the kind of detail that sticks longer than a framework.
Dr Busic takes on resistance, and her argument is that it is not a character flaw to be managed out of people. It is brain biology. Our fear centres were not built for chronic activation, and the pace of AI era change pushes people into reactive survival mode, where almost nothing you want from them is available. She is candid about the limits of what she will take on: she turns down resilience training engagements when the executive team is not doing the work themselves, because the programme becomes theatre. Her line on why humans succeed is deliberately deflating. It is not that we are the smartest species. It is that we are the best copycats, which is also why leadership behaviour propagates whether you intend it to or not.
Together they make the case that the organisations that win this cycle will not be the ones with the best models. They will be the ones that remember people are still the greatest thing they will ever build.
Key insights
- Adoption is not return. 93% of organisations have adopted AI with almost no measurable benefit, which means your reporting is probably measuring access rather than change.
- 31% of employees are actively sabotaging AI strategies from inside the organisation. That is a number to plan around, not a number to be surprised by.
- Find your automation ceiling deliberately. The work above it, judgement, empathy and relational intelligence, is where your remaining headcount is actually creating value.
- Resistance is physiology, not attitude. Chronic fear activation puts people into survival mode, and no amount of enablement content reaches someone in that state.
- Do not buy resilience training for the layer below you while the executive team opts out. Dr Busic refuses those engagements for a reason: people copy what leaders do, not what they announce.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
