You built something cool with AI, showed your team, and got blank stares. Or worse, polished work that falls apart on a second read. Gleb’s point is that the problem isn’t the tool. It’s how your people feel about it, and those feelings come in three flavors. This SOP gives you one move for each. Run it before your next AI rollout.
The Play: One Line
Stop selling AI to your team as one group. Find the alarmists, the pragmatic resistors and the reluctant adopters, then give each the one move that answers their real fear.
Why your AI rollout stalls with your team
Owners tend to be excited about AI. Employees tend to be anxious. Gleb points to a Pew finding that 52% of people are more anxious than excited about AI tools, and only 9% are more excited than anxious. Guess which camp the owner is in. His warning: “the leader needs to understand that her or his gut does not lead to the right outcome with AI adoption because their gut emotions, their intuitions are at odds with the emotions of their employees.”
That gap is why, in the MIT research he cites, 95% of AI initiatives fail to scale. Individuals get faster. The business doesn’t. As Gleb puts it, “AI is showing individual productivity, but the group dynamics is where it’s at. And that’s not the technology.” When people feel forced, they push back quietly: rushed AI output that looks polished and isn’t, which Gleb calls AI workslop. From the employee’s seat, he says, that resistance makes sense: “It’s rational, like it’s not dumb.”
You also can’t roll AI out like a CRM. You can watch someone enter a customer record. You can’t stand over their shoulder and check whether they’re using an AI assistant well, because each person has to shape it to their own work. That takes motivation, and fear kills motivation. If you’re still deciding where AI fits at all, start with the 1% Rollout SOP. This one is for the people side.
The three kinds of AI resistance on your team
Gleb’s book sorts resistance into three psychographic profiles, built from his consulting work. Most small teams have all three.
AI alarmists
What they fear: That using AI means training their own replacement. Gleb says this is the biggest group.
Your move: Commit to growth, then flip the script (steps 3 and 4).
Pragmatic resistors
What they fear: Identity threat. Often senior writers, marketers and finance pros who take pride in work AI can now do.
Your move: Survey what they hate, then build prompts around it (steps 5 and 6).
Reluctant adopters
What they fear: Stigma. They already use AI but hide it, then quietly finish early.
Your move: Model your own use and reward sharing (steps 7 and 8).
The 8 steps to an AI rollout your team will actually use
1
Before you start
Check your own gut before you demo anything
You are probably excited about AI. Your team probably isn’t. Gleb’s first question with any client is how big that gap is. Before your next AI show-and-tell, watch how people react, not how cool the tool is. Gleb caught himself doing this at his own eight-person firm: “I was initially doing too much of the demoing of cool AI use cases until I started really thinking about like the experience of my employees”.
2
Before you start
Sort your team into the three profiles
Use the three profiles in the box above. You don’t need a formal assessment for a small team. Listen for the objection. Fear of being replaced points to an alarmist. Pride in work that AI can now do points to a pragmatic resistor. The person who finishes suspiciously early and never mentions AI is a reluctant adopter. Each one needs a different move.
3
AI alarmists
Commit to growth, not job cuts, and say it out loud
Make it a company decision that AI is for growth. In Gleb’s words: “Instead, what you want to focus on is how can we focus on growth?” He points to a Stanford study that found AI-forward companies grew revenue and headcount faster than peers in their industry. Jobs will still change. Tell people the goal is to grow, then make your decisions match it.
4
AI alarmists
Flip the script on who gets replaced
Alarmists believe that by using AI they’re training their own replacement. Answer that head-on. Gleb’s framing: “It’s not by using AI tools that you’ll be replaced. It’s that if you don’t learn how to use AI effectively, you won’t really stick around here.” Add the career angle he raises: an accountant or marketer who can use AI well is more employable anywhere, not just with you.
5
Pragmatic resistors
Survey the tasks people hate, and what blocks the work they love
Pragmatic resistors are senior people protecting a professional identity. Don’t start by automating the work they’re proud of. Ask instead: “what are the tasks that you hate? What do you dislike? What would you like to get off your plate?” Then ask what gets in the way of the work they love, such as pulling data from five places before they can build the deck they’re proud of.
6
Pragmatic resistors
Build prompts and agent skeletons from their answers
Turn each survey answer into a starter prompt or a rough agent workflow the person can pick up and finish. Real case studies, built around what they asked to get rid of. The economically big tasks come later, once they’ve seen it work. Gleb calls it going slow to go fast.
7
Reluctant adopters
Model your own AI use, out loud
Reluctant adopters use AI quietly because they fear the stigma. Gleb’s fix: “what you really want to focus on is leadership modeling.” Tell your team how you use it for emails, board or investor decks, sales outreach and performance reviews. His example: AI helps him look at a full year of someone’s work instead of the last month before a review.
8
Reluctant adopters
Open a share channel and reward the best use case every month
Create a Slack channel, a Teams channel or a Trello card where people post what they did with AI. Praise the good ones publicly. Then make it a monthly habit: Gleb recommends “something like a $25 Starbucks card every month for the person who shares the coolest AI use case”. Small reward, big signal that using AI here is normal.
The research behind the play
Gleb built these three profiles for his book, which he describes as peer-reviewed. On the show he said it draws on these sources:
100+
consulting projects
10,000+
survey responses
600
focus group responses
50+
interviews with leaders
Take the whole SOP with you
One printable page: the play, the 8 steps, a team-profile worksheet and a checklist. No email required.
