Only 36% of Workers Say Leaders Are Honest About AI Change

Only 36% of information-economy workers say their leader has been honest about how AI will change their work, according to a new FranklinCovey Institute survey. Honesty ranked as the No. 1 AI behavior respondents said they wanted from their leaders — a gap HR teams cannot ignore as AI adoption accelerates.

The finding points to a deeper people-process problem: employees are not merely resisting new technology, they are grieving what it replaces. Change management practitioner Kwesi Johnson, writing on what he calls "AI grief," argues that leaders who dismiss resistance as stubbornness misread the signal and lose the chance to redirect that energy toward the organization's mission.

What does an office move reveal about AI resistance?

Johnson opens with a case from his own consulting work: an organization moved into a brand-new facility across town. On paper, the change was positive — a market-leading company, passionate people, better resources. Some employees were nonetheless genuinely upset. Johnson, who works in organizational change management, admits the intensity caught him off guard.

His conclusion: employees were not resisting a building. They were grieving the routines that had sustained them for years — commutes that connected home and work life, breakrooms and hallways where they reliably found the right colleague. If a relocation can trigger that response, he writes, consider what happens when employees must embrace technology that could change their jobs, their expertise and how they see their own value.

The context amplifies the anxiety. Generative AI has been cast as a destroyer of white-collar jobs and a threat to entry-level prospects — the force behind a $300 billion software stock selloff known as the "SaaS-pocalypse." Many of the worst predictions have proved exaggerated so far, Johnson notes, but workers have absorbed a steady stream of speculation about AI making them redundant and devaluing skills honed over decades.

Why does AI feel like a threat on five fronts?

Johnson grounds the emotional mechanics in David Rock's SCARF model, which names five domains of social experience — status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness — that trigger strong reactions when threatened. AI, he argues, hits all five at once:

• Status: Worker expertise sits on seemingly equal footing with a machine's.
• Certainty: Confidence in the future of one's role erodes.
• Autonomy: Control over how work gets done weakens.
• Relatedness: Work becomes more depersonalized and individualized.
• Fairness: Adoption feels imposed — "resistance is futile," as the science fiction robots like to say.

Seen through that lens, strong reactions to AI are instinctual rather than transactional, which means logical reassurance alone will not land.

Do leaders have their own grief to process?

They do, and many have not processed it, Johnson writes. Leaders have had to overhaul pre-AI strategies that were products of their own experience and expertise — strategies that long underpinned their career confidence. Starting over means accepting they will not be as fluent in the AI strategy as in the old one.

Many forge ahead and project confidence anyway. That projection can come at the expense of honesty and transparency, and stressed leaders may skip the open dialogue that acknowledges disruption. A leader who has processed their own reaction can instead model the behavior teams need — talking about their own grief over lost certainty and building the shared experience that establishes authentic connection.

What should HR and leaders actually do?

Johnson draws a direct parallel to existing HR practice: organizations routinely bring counseling and support to employees affected by tragedy or trauma, as many did during the COVID pandemic. They rarely bring that same attention to the AI transition, whose effects may prove more pervasive and enduring.

Two moves matter most:

• Empathy plus honesty. Many leaders have avoided even alluding to potential headcount reductions, but people need honesty even when answers are uncomfortable — the FranklinCovey data shows only about one in three workers currently gets it.
• Visible early action. In a new building, the sense of loss fades once people discover what works better — a brighter meeting room, a shorter walk for coffee. AI works the same way: early, visible progress helps people "move in" to the new way of working emotionally and intellectually.

Resistance itself carries information, Johnson writes. People grieve what they value, so employees who resist AI are demonstrating commitment and signaling which parts of their work they care about most — individual expertise for some, collaborative teams for others. Leaders who read the signal correctly can show how AI serves the larger mission and help contributors see their value as something not static.

Johnson will expand on the topic at the Training Magazine Network webinar "AI Works When People Do," streaming live November 3 at 3 p.m. Eastern, with a recording available afterward — a signal that vendors and training providers expect grief-informed AI adoption to become a standard leadership curriculum item.