You've probably seen reports of CEOs issuing mandates to use AI. One exec took that up a notch by terminating the vast majority of the team because they didn't follow along.

(Source: Futurism, "CEO Boasts That He Laid Off 80 Percent of His Staff Because They Didn't Love AI Enough, Threatens to Do It Again")

This strikes me as fairly heavy-handed.

I get that genAI is advertised as a money-saver and productivity-booster. And from that, I get why execs would be eager for their teams to adopt this technology. But top-down, company-wide mandates won't bring the kind of change those execs are after.

The takeaway lesson:

As a leader, you must trust that team members understand how to do their job. If they're hesitant to inject AI into their workflow, that sounds like an opportunity for company leadership to take a pause and dig into the reasons. Perhaps it's a training issue, because they don't understand what genAI can do for them. Perhaps they understand enough about genAI to realize that it won't actually help them with their work.

Whatever the case, recognize that genAI won't yield massive improvement in every department. Terminating employment because people aren't excited about AI is a great way to encourage wasteful, messy, high-risk adoption of the technology while also avoiding the use cases that drive value.

(If your company is trying to develop meaningful, actionable use cases for AI, please reach out. I can help.)