The economics of entire industries are about to be redrawn, and the race will go to the swift. Companies that quickly learn how to gain an AI edge in their sectors—and are able to keep learning and adapting—will see their advantages compound.  

But flexibility is not a trait of people frozen by fear. AI is no ordinary technology upgrade, and treating it like one is a mistake. We have helped companies navigate every major technology wave of the last 40 years. The principles of successful transformations still hold. What makes AI different is what it asks of the people living through this one.

Prior transformations had clear end states and a familiar arc. People knew roughly what the finish line looked like. AI offers no such clarity. The destination keeps moving, the pace is torrid, and the technology continues to evolve. And it asks people to confront an entirely new question: What will the future of human work look like? The fear of losing your job haunts every transformation. This one makes people wonder if their career—their very purpose—could evaporate overnight.

Our most recent CEO survey tells the story plainly: Only one in five CEOs say they are realizing most or all the AI results they set out to capture. The barriers they cite most are not about technology but instead relate to people: a workforce that lacks the expertise and tools to support the change, a tendency to stay anchored on local pilots rather than broad transformation, and real hesitancy and resistance to adopting AI at the pace required. The bottleneck is human, and it is widening every quarter.

Breaking through that fear to realize competitive advantage is the real work that AI transformation requires. That work concentrates in the people whose judgment, relationships, and credibility determine whether the transformation will actually translate into results: the managers and frontline champions in the places where strategy meets execution. Their adoption of AI determines whether AI investments deliver. They are watching AI arrive and quietly asking themselves a question too personal for any survey to capture: What does this mean for my job, my relevance, and the career I have built? If that anxiety goes unaddressed, the company will watch competitors that are getting it right begin to pull away with frightening speed.

Gen Z workers fear AI

30

trust AI-assisted work

81

expect AI to decrease jobs overall

^{Sources: Gallup, Voices of Gen Z (February 24 to March 4, 2026, n=1,572); Quinnipiac University Poll, “The Age of Artificial Intelligence” (March 2026).}

The leaders we see actually delivering results treat the human side of AI transformation not as a change management workstream to be delegated but as the work itself. They know that people need a compelling picture of where they are going, a network around them that makes the new ways of working feel normal, and a direct, tangible experience of AI improving their working lives. We’ve seen those first two as features of successful transformations for decades, and they remain essential today. The third is also familiar: People have always needed help to move through the disruption caused by change. What’s different now is the amplified level of disruption that AI creates.

The beach: People need a vision of their AI destination

In past transformations, the best leaders succeeded by being clear and specific about the destination. They painted the beach, a compelling and tangible picture of the future that gives people something to move toward. That’s even more important today.

For much of the past three years, the dominant AI narrative inside organizations was about cost and productivity. Some still default to it. But the promise of efficiency does not generate the energy that the change requires. Instead, it generates anxiety. When people hear that AI will make the business faster and leaner, what they hear is that some of us will not be needed. Klarna cut 40% of its workforce from December 2022 to December 2024, framing AI as a replacement engine, before its CEO announced publicly in May 2025 that the company had focused too much on efficiency and cost and was actively rehiring. Duolingo’s CEO made a similar pivot after a blunt memo on headcount and automation landed badly enough that he acknowledged within weeks he had not done it well.

The leaders getting this right are sketching a different kind of future, rooted in what AI makes possible for the people doing the work, not just what becomes cheaper. To do that, they run workforce and workflow transformation in parallel. Redesigning processes while reskilling and reengaging people helps dispel anxiety and spur adoption. AI can speed or even eliminate mundane and repetitive tasks, allowing today’s workers to devote more time, talent, and energy to the essence of their job and the judgment it requires. Microsoft's CEO has described a world where all of us become “managers of infinite minds.” One chief digital transformation officer at a Fortune 500 consumer packaged goods company described the shift plainly: The team realized it could not keep talking about cost savings and landed on a simple organizing idea, that “simplifying work plus digital equals easy.” The whole transformation was built around making lives easier for employees, and that created genuine momentum for the effort.

The picture of the beach cannot rely on inspiration alone or it will fall short. People also need to understand why the change cannot wait. The case for change is not only a brighter working future but also an honest account of why standing still is the real risk. Profit pools are shifting, competitors are moving, and the window to build advantage is closing fast. The companies pulling ahead of slower adopters—whether through innovation or by taking market share—are the ones whose employees are helping them build proprietary intelligence, creating advantages that compound.

The most effective leaders deliver both parts of that message at once: an inspiring picture of what becomes possible for each person, and a clear, urgent reason the organization has to move now rather than later. Fear of the unknown gets replaced not by false comfort but by a clear reason to act.

“Some [companies] are more successful than others,” says Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, the parent company of Booking.com, Priceline, OpenTable, Kayak, and other travel sites. “And part of the reason is because the people on the team … have an objective they want to win. They’re not showing up just to get a paycheck. They’re there to accomplish a mission, to achieve something.”

“People ... are not showing up just to get a paycheck. They’re there to accomplish a mission, to achieve something.”

In an AI world, the beach is never drawn in ink. It is sketched in pencil, clear enough to set direction and inspire action but designed to adapt as the technology and the organization learn. Over time, that picture is colored in by people across the organization who are delivering real value: sharing early wins, celebrating progress, and reinforcing the picture of what the future looks like.

The spine: AI needs commitment and champions at every level of the organization

Successful transformations make new ways of working feel normal, not heroic. That doesn’t happen one person at a time but via a sponsorship spine: the unbroken, visible commitment that carries a transformation from the boardroom to the front line. If commitment is absent at any level, change comes to a halt. In AI transformation, that cascade starts with the CEO. 

The signal must start at the very top. Senior leaders who take a genuine personal stake in the transformation and commit real time to it are signaling to the organization how seriously to take AI and how far to trust it. Christophe de Vusser, Bain’s CEO and Worldwide Managing Partner, spends 20% of his time on the firm’s AI transformation as a signal to every employee of the firm—and its clients—of the commitment required.

“If the CEO is enthusiastic about AI, after a while, people will start to figure out whether they’re enthusiastic, too,” says Bob Bradway, CEO of Amgen. Bradway, who put his entire senior executive team through AI courses, is a hands-on AI user who vibe codes and has used AI to solve questions over the weekend instead of handing the task to his team.

A Microsoft study found that when managers actively modeled AI use, employees reported a 30-percentage-point lift in trust in agentic AI. Yet only one in four AI users believed their organizational leadership was consistently aligned on AI strategy. The gap between sponsorship in name and sponsorship in practice is where momentum leaks away.

Sponsorship is also about creating the right environment for learning. The managers in the middle need explicit permission and encouragement to experiment, to learn by doing, and to stumble along the way. Much of the fear that AI generates among middle managers and frontline teams comes from feeling they are expected to have mastered a technology that is changing weekly. When leaders visibly make space for experimentation and learning, and treat early fumbling as part of the process rather than failure, they lower the stakes enough for people to actually start.

“If the CEO is enthusiastic about AI, after a while, people will start to figure out whether they’re enthusiastic, too.” 

Sponsorship from the top is essential, but it is not enough. An AI transformation opens up radically different ways of working, but old ways of working are deeply embedded in daily practice and can’t always be turned off. What bridges the gap is peer influence through a community of champions. People naturally want to learn from and emulate peers who are discovering—and being celebrated for—new approaches. In Microsoft’s research, top AI users were nearly twice as likely to say their teams brainstorm and refine business processes together to spot AI opportunities. At digital solutions and services provider Presidio, function-level champions were trained centrally and deployed to share best practices and gather feedback, and the program worked so well that a client asked to copy it directly.

Every organization also has tinkerers, the people already using AI on their own time, finding breakthrough applications and developing instincts about what works. Microsoft found that these same top AI users were also significantly more likely to share AI tips, learnings, and mistakes with their peers. They are a force multiplier for influence and a sensing layer on where AI is really landing. The leaders who win know who these people are, give them the tools they need, and listen to them. Leaders are especially deliberate about the middle manager. As one transformation officer at a consumer packaged goods company put it, this group must design the new ways of working. Anything imposed on them will suffer organ rejection, and they will find their way around it. The spine works only when conviction travels down from the top and real, lived experience travels back up.

The heart: Overcome people’s new AI fears by removing old frustrations

Change has always created anxiety. But AI creates anxiety about identity, relevance, and the arc of a career, and it sits heaviest on the very people you most need to carry the change. Among Gen Z workers, fewer than 3 in 10 trust AI-assisted work, and 81% expect AI to decrease jobs overall. The fear is real, and silence reads as confirmation of the worst.

The leaders managing this well are not trying to argue people out of their anxiety. They meet people where they are, and they lead with action rather than reassurance. The principle is “show, don’t tell.” The fastest way to shift a skeptical mindset is not another town hall about the vision but instead to take something genuinely painful out of their week. When The Adecco Group began its AI transformation, it started by working with the employees who were most eager to learn about AI rather than trying to convince the ones who were more wary.

“AI has to happen with people, not to people,” notes Denis Machuel, CEO of employment agency The Adecco Group. That meant working alongside the agency’s recruiters to identify tasks that were cumbersome or didn’t add value from a human perspective, and keeping the recruiters focused on what they do best: human-to-human connection. Recruiters soon saw how much more productive AI made them and how much more they enjoyed the work. “When you start to do that,” says Machuel, “then the word of mouth goes across the whole enterprise, like, ‘well, I enjoy my work more because I'm doing all the stuff that I love,’ [and] then adoption scales.”

When AI eliminates the work, hand-offs, and processes that people hate, the payoff is immediate and personal. People can relax and begin to enjoy the ride. Presidio Chief Transformation Officer Paula Cipollone described announcing that the team was fixing a process people had hated for years, and watching the room respond with a standing ovation. That is energy no training program can manufacture. Remove the drudgery first, let people feel the relief in their own daily experience, and the appetite for everything harder tends to follow. Mindsets shift when the value becomes concrete, not when it is described.

“AI has to happen with people, not to people.” 

Even when AI does provide that payoff, fears can still persist, and when they do, the answer is to show up in person. As one Fortune 500 company approached go-live, anxiety turned into resistance: Teams said they were not ready, concerns escalated, and trust broke down. The chief transformation officer organized in-person sessions, creating space for people to voice what worried them and talk through real solutions. Being present in the room, rather than managing through announcements, turned resistance back into movement.

Inspire, motivate, listen

The leaders who are breaking through aren’t treating AI as simply a bigger or faster version of past technology efforts. But one thing does remain the same: People are at the center of any successful transformation. And the people who are most anxious about this change are also the ones most essential to its success.

The path through their fear is the transformation itself, a journey everyone in the organization takes together. Inspire them with the beach, a picture of the future that is both genuinely exciting and honest about why the organization must move now. Motivate them through the spine, from a personally invested CEO at the head of the organization to a network of peers and champions who make the new way feel normal. And focus on the heart, tackling the parts of their jobs people never liked and replacing fear with courage so that the value of AI becomes something they feel rather than something they are told to believe.

Every move a company makes—or doesn’t—is a bet on a rapidly unfolding future. Waiting is a choice, but it comes at the expense of the learning, adoption, and compounding advantage the leaders are building right now. Leave fear unaddressed, and the best strategy in the world will stall in the middle. Break through it, and that advantage is yours.

The authors draw on Bain's Results Delivery practice, its 2026 CEO Survey (n=100), and interviews with chief transformation officers and chief digital officers across industries.