Before I build anything AI-related now, I ask myself one question: what is this actually replacing for the person on the other end, and how do they feel about that?
It sounds like a soft question for a pretty technical rollout. I think it’s the most important one.
People Don’t Resist the Tool. They Resist What It Implies.
Early in my career, in psychology, I learned that people rarely resist the thing itself. They resist what it implies about them.
A new process implies the old way was wrong. A new tool implies your old skills matter less. Nobody says that part out loud, but it’s almost always underneath the resistance you actually see.
AI amplifies this more than most changes I’ve managed, because it touches something people take personally: their competence.
When I ask an engineer to use a new automation, I’m not just asking them to learn a tool. I’m implicitly asking them to trust that a machine can do part of their thinking, in a role where their thinking is the whole job.
Starting Training in a Different Place
So the training I build now starts somewhere different than it used to.
Instead of “here’s how to use this,” it starts with “here’s what this is not trying to replace, and here’s exactly where your judgment still matters most.”
That one framing shift changes how people show up to the rest of the content. They’re not defending their expertise anymore. They’re curious.
Why AI Enablement Isn’t Just a “Tools” Problem
This is also why I don’t think AI enablement should live purely in the “tools” category, separate from the human side of learning design.
The tools change constantly and will keep changing faster than any of us can document. What doesn’t change is the psychology of why people adopt something new, or quietly avoid it.
Get that part right, and the tool-specific training becomes almost secondary. Get it wrong, and no amount of great documentation will fix it.
The Belief Underneath All of It
That’s the belief underneath everything I’ve built this past year.
Not “how do I teach AI,” but “how do I help someone feel like themselves while they’re learning something that feels like it might replace them.”
Different question. Much better results.
Happy Learning,
KP