Your people care more about their problems than your AI strategy

Voters in this week’s midterms were focused on their problems, not loyal to any party. The people inside your organization relate to your AI program the same way. Your board goals and your concerns about long-term competitive advantage are abstract to the people doing the day-to-day work, because those aren’t the things they’re judged on. If you want them to change how they work, it’s on you to make AI matter in their day-to-day.

Voters focused on their problems, and switched parties to do it

Set aside who won. The more useful story for anyone leading change is how people voted. The economy was the top issue, named first by 39% of voters in NBC News’s exit poll, and what they meant by it was concrete: 88% were concerned about the cost of groceries. What moved was the party they trusted to fix it. Two years ago, voters trusted one party more on the economy by 7 points, and this week they trusted the other by 6. Voters under 30 went from roughly an even split in 2024 to about 7 in 10 backing one side, according to the AP’s voter poll. The priority of the issue remained consistent, but their loyalty didn’t.

AI came up in the exit polls too, and the mood should push leaders to be thoughtful about how to proceed: 57% of voters said AI will do more to hurt society than help. The people you’re asking to adopt these tools haven’t been sold on the big-picture case yet, so they’ll judge AI by what it does for them in their own work.

Employees make the same choice

One of our clients, a software organization, ran into this directly. Their executive team wanted to grow revenue aggressively, and they wanted the whole organization to embrace AI in order to do so. They said so clearly and often; team members had no reason to doubt or wonder whether this was a priority for the organization.

Where this organization ran into trouble, though, was that AI never became part of the goals an individual was held to. So, when people had to choose between learning the tools and changing how they work, or taking the predictable path to the targets they already had, they chose the targets that were in front of them. Those targets were their version of the “kitchen table issues” that politicians and campaigns talk about so often.

The detail that matters most: the rollout started with the people who were already the most AI-savvy users (based on usage metrics). Even they stalled. Nobody had made time and space for them to go deeper and learn new ways of working, so the early phases struggled. That rules out lack of interest as the explanation. These were the enthusiasts that already had the knowledge, and they were just too busy.

This isn’t unusual. Only 25% of U.S. employees say their organization has communicated a clear plan for integrating AI (Gallup), and the share who feel positive about it rises from 15% to 55% with strong leadership support (BCG).

How we connected big-picture goals to “kitchen table” issues

Though it was challenging at first to sustain engagement, we turned it around by working with leaders further down the org chart to find the parts of their teams’ work that most needed streamlining. Then we layered the AI opportunities into what those teams were already focused on and, in a lot of cases, stressed out about finishing. We also cut the process and the communications down to what busy people would actually read.

Some of that work was regularly taking 5 to 10 hours a week of individual team members’ time. Some of it wasn’t getting done at all, because doing it by hand was too onerous. For example, the learning and development team had a constant back-and-forth of communications that needed routing. The renewals team wanted clearer guidance for customer success on how to approach renewals, so we helped them work out that strategy first, then shape and scope the tooling to support it.

The clearest example was a weekly report one team owed the board. It took about 10 hours of work across the team every week, and it was due every Monday, including when that Monday was a holiday, which meant people signing on over the weekend to produce it. “No more weekly reports” became one of the focus areas. That was the team’s problem.

But we can’t just focus on the small fixes, right?

The strongest objection to all of this is a fair one: it’s tactical work dressed up as strategy. Build your AI program around whatever your team is stressed about this quarter, and you’ll get a pile of small fixes and never the step change your board is asking for.

That’s a sound critique, and the answer is to be savvy about where you start. Look for the overlap: the processes and workflows that would let you move faster on your big-picture goals and make meaningful improvements in your teams’ work. The weekly report sat squarely in it. For the team, it was 10 hours a week and weekends spent signing on. For leadership, fixing it meant better reporting on marketing data and a clearer view of how marketing was performing, which is exactly what the report existed to give the board. Work like that solves your problem as a leader and gives your program momentum.

Start by tracing the line

Here’s what I’d recommend you do next: trace the line from the outcomes your board wants to the key processes and workflows your team would love to streamline and take off their plates. Find where the two meet, pick one, and name it in words your team would use themselves.

Your AI program may be about a whole lot more than that one piece of work. The way you talk about it still has to be specific and tangible enough for people to latch onto, and this is where I think leaders can learn the most from politics. Policy is incredibly complex, but the way you get people moving is with plain language and compelling ideas that matter to them. Running an AI program is, to an extent, a branding exercise. “Become an AI-first organization” is a line for a board. “No more weekly reports” is a line for a team.

Try this

To help you trace that line, we put together a prompt you can paste into whichever AI assistant you use. It interviews you, keeps asking why until it gets past the board-level language, and helps you draft the line your team would actually repeat.

Interview me, one question at a time, to connect my organization's top priorities to the work my team struggles with day to day. Wait for my answer before asking the next question.

Part 1: What leadership is measuring
1. Ask me for the two or three outcomes my board or leadership team is tracking for the near future.
2. For each outcome, ask what has to go right on the ground for it to happen. Then ask "why does that matter?" up to five times, until we reach a specific process, report, handoff, or decision that real people handle every week.

Part 2: What the team is struggling with
3. For each process from Part 1, ask me which recurring tasks tied to it my team complains about, works late or on weekends to finish, or quietly skips because they take too long by hand. Push for specifics: who does it, how often, and roughly how many hours it takes.
4. If I don't know, help me write three questions I can ask my team this week to find out.

Part 3: The overlap
5. Build a table that matches the processes from Part 1 against the tasks from Part 2. Mark where they overlap, meaning work that would move a leadership outcome forward if it took less effort.
6. Ask me to pick one item from the overlap to start with, and to explain why.

Part 4: The line
7. Help me write five candidate one-line names for this effort. Each should name the problem being removed, in words my team would use rather than words from a board deck. Ask me which one my team would actually repeat.

Finish with a one-page summary: the leadership outcome, the process, the team's problem, the chosen line, and the first step for next week.