Join Me April 30 H.U.M.A.N. First™ Leadership: Your Secret Weapon for AI Adoption

Have you seen this latest AI data point?

Less than 1 in 3 managers are actively supporting their organization’s AI adoption right now.

Not because they don’t want to. Not because they’re resistant to change. Because nobody built the human conditions underneath the technology before they hit go on the rollout.

And here’s what that costs:

Gallup just released their 2026 State of the Global Workplace report. Global employee engagement has dropped to 20% — its lowest point since 2020. The productivity loss from that disengagement? $10 trillion annually. Nine percent of global GDP. Gone. Before AI even enters the equation.

Now layer an AI transformation on top of that.

You’re not accelerating returns. You’re accelerating risk.

Here’s what nobody in the AI conversation is saying clearly enough:

The organizations getting real ROI on their AI investment are not the ones with the most sophisticated technology stack.

They’re the ones who built the human conditions first.

BCG and Columbia Business School surveyed nearly 1,400 employees and leaders and found something that stopped me cold: employee centricity is the single biggest driver of AI maturity. Bigger than industry. Bigger than revenue. Bigger than company size.

Employee-centric organizations are 7 times more likely to be AI mature.

And Gallup found that teams with an engaged manager are 8.7 times more likely to see AI transformation succeed.

This is not a soft finding. This is the variable your AI vendor isn’t putting in the ROI projection.

So why is this still being treated as a people problem instead of a performance problem?

Because we’ve been trained to see leadership development as overhead. As the nice-to-have. As the thing that gets cut when budgets tighten.

But the data is saying something different now. It’s saying the leadership layer is the infrastructure. And right now, that infrastructure has a crack in it.

Manager engagement dropped 9 points since 2022. In a single year — 2024 to 2025 — it fell 5 points. For the first time in Gallup’s history, managers are only as engaged as the people they lead. The engagement premium that used to come with leadership responsibility has essentially disappeared.

These are the same people being asked to bring their teams through the biggest workplace transformation of our lifetime.

And the fear signal? Executives aren’t seeing it.

30% of employees are actively undermining their company’s AI rollout. Not passively ignoring it — actively. Uploading proprietary data to public tools. Selectively using systems in ways that make the adoption numbers look better than reality. Quietly slowing things down.

ADP surveyed 39,000 workers across 36 countries and said it plainly:

“The anxiety gripping workers today is not inevitable. It is, in large part, a leadership failure.”

Not a technology failure. A leadership failure.

Here’s the good news.

This is correctable. And it doesn’t require adding something new to already-overwhelmed leaders.

The organizations winning at AI transformation right now are doing three things differently. They communicate the human story of AI — not just the technical one. They connect adoption to what employees actually care about — their growth, their expertise, their future. And they build trust before they deploy tools.

That’s not a new capability. It’s a familiar one that gets crowded out when pace and pressure take over.

Our team built the H.U.M.A.N. First™ Leadership Framework because we kept walking into organizations with the same problem — the technology was ready, the people weren’t, and leadership didn’t have language for the gap. This framework gives them that language. And it gives them a path.

This Thursday, April 30th at 11am ET, I’m hosting a live executive session:

H.U.M.A.N. First™ Leadership: Your Secret Weapon for AI Adoption

We’re going to cover exactly what the research shows is stalling AI ROI — and what leaders can do about it starting Monday morning. I’ll walk through the data, the framework, and what it actually looks like inside organizations that are getting this right.

This session is built for CHROs, CIOs, CTOs, CEOs, COOs, and senior leaders who are accountable for making AI transformation actually land — not just launch.

Register here

If you’ve been in a room where AI rollout is on the agenda but nobody’s talking about the people side — this session is for you.