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The AI Briefing is your 5-minute daily intelligence report on AI in the workplace. Designed for busy corporate leaders, we distill the latest news, emerging agentic tools, and strategic insights into a quick, actionable briefing. No fluff, no jargon overload—just the AI knowledge you need to lead confidently in an automated world.
Welcome to the AI briefing. Here's what's keeping most AI transformations from delivering value. We're treating AI like software when we should be treating it like a colleague. BCG's latest research reveals a troubling gap. While 76% of leaders use generative AI several times a week, only 51% of frontline employees have adopted it.
Tom Barber:That's not a technology problem. That's a relationship problem. Think about how you onboard a new team member. You don't just hand them a laptop and expect results. You provide training.
Tom Barber:You set clear expectations. You give them leadership support. Most importantly, you integrate them into your workflows, not just your tech stack. Yet that's exactly what we're not doing with AI. Consider two companies with radically different approaches.
Tom Barber:Planner automated their customer service with top down mandate claiming their AI replaced 700 agents. But within a year, they quietly started rehiring humans. Why? Because they deployed AI like a cost cutting tool instead of integrating it into like a team member. Trust eroded inside and outside the company.
Tom Barber:Contrast that with pharmaceutical company that used AI to surface real time insights from employee sentiment and internal feedback. They treated AI as a collaborative partner that enhanced human decision making. The difference? One saw AI as a replacement. The other saw it as a teammate.
Tom Barber:Here's what the research shows. First, leadership support matters enormously. When leaders demonstrate strong AI support, employee positivity jumps from 15 to 55%, but only one quarter of frontline employees say they receive that support. Second, proper training is nonnegotiable. Regular AI usage sharply increases when employees receive at least five hours of training with access to in person coaching, yet only one third say they've been properly trained.
Tom Barber:Third, embrace the messy reality. Traditional change management has a seventy percent failure rate because it treats change as linear and predictable. But AI driven transformation is cyclical, organic, and driven by what most reaches researchers call AI eureka moments. Those breakthrough discoveries that happen when people experiment with technology. The company's winning this transition aren't brushing humans through change programs.
Tom Barber:They're creating flexible pilots, establishing feedback loops and allowing their organizational DNA to rewrite itself in real time. So here's your takeaway. Competitive advantage in the AI era isn't built by deploying tools faster. It's built by how seamlessly your people and AI collaborate to reshape work itself. So ask yourself, are you giving your AI the same consideration you'd be giving a new hire?
Tom Barber:Are you providing training context and integration support, or are you just deploying software and hoping for the best? The difference between those two approaches is the difference between transformation and disappointment. I'm Tom. See you next time.