Why AI Adoption Hinges on Employee Feelings, Not Just Features

To fully unlock AI's potential, leaders must go beyond technical capabilities and focus on building emotional trust among employees, ensuring they feel confident and engaged with new technologies.

Research: It's Amazing – But Terrifying!: Unveiling the Combined Effect of Emotional and Cognitive Trust on Organizational Member' Behaviours, AI Performance, and Adoption. Image Credit: 13_Phunkod / Shutterstock

Successful adoption of new technology is a matter of emotions. With four in five companies saying they're failing to capitalize on its potential, researchers from Aalto University say managers need to know how to deal with them.

AI has the potential to enhance decision-making, spark innovation, and help leaders boost employees' productivity. Many large companies have invested accordingly in both funding and effort. Yet despite this, studies show that they fail to achieve the expected benefits, with as many as 80 percent of companies reporting a failure to benefit from the new technology.

'Often employees fail to embrace new AI and benefit from it, but we don't really know why,' says Assistant Professor Natalia Vuori from Aalto University. Our limited understanding stems partly from the tendency to study these failings as limitations of the technologies themselves or from the perspective of users' cognitive judgments about AI performance, she says.

'What we learned is that success is not so much about technology and its capabilities, but about the different emotional and behavioral reactions employees develop towards AI - and how leaders can manage these reactions," says Vuori. 

Her research team followed a consulting company of 600 employees for over a year as it attempted to develop and implement a new artificial intelligence tool. The tool was supposed to collect employees' digital footprints and map their skills and abilities, ultimately building a capabilities map of the company. The results were supposed to streamline the team selection process for consulting projects, and the whole experiment was, in fact, a pilot for AI software they hoped to offer their customers. The research findings were published in the Journal of Management Studies.

After almost two years, the company buried the experiment - and the proposed product. So what happened?

Although some staff believed that the tool performed well and was valuable, they were uncomfortable with AI following their calendar notes, internal communications, and daily dealings. As a result, employees either stopped providing information alone or started manipulating the system by feeding it information they thought would benefit their career path. This led to the AI becoming increasingly inaccurate in its output, feeding a vicious cycle as users started losing faith in its abilities.

'Leaders couldn't understand why the AI usage was declining. They were taking a lot of action to promote the tools and so on, trying to explain how they use the data, but it didn't help,' says Vuori, who believes this case study reflects a typical pattern regarding AI uptake and tech adoption generally. 

The team is now collecting data on Microsoft's widely used Copilot AI software, which has yielded similar findings.

What should leaders do?

Researchers found that people fell into the same four groups in terms of their reaction to the new technology. Distinguishing between cognitive trust, whether a person believes the technology performs well, and emotional trust, their feelings towards the system, the groups were complete trust, full distrust, uncomfortable trust, and blind trust.

The first group had high cognitive and emotional trust, whereas the second group scored low on both. Uncomfortable trust signified high cognitive trust but low emotional trust, and vice versa for blind trust.

The less people trusted the tool emotionally, the more they restricted, withdrew, or manipulated their digital footprint, and this was particularly notable even if they had cognitive trust in the technology. 

The findings allow companies to strategize a more successful approach to AI uptake. 

"AI adoption isn't just a technological challenge - it's a leadership one. Success hinges on understanding trust and addressing emotions, and making employees feel excited about using and experimenting with AI," says Vuori. "Without this human-centered approach, and strategies that are tailored to address the needs of each group, even the smartest AI will fail to deliver on its potential."