INSIGHTS: Before Measuring AI Adoption, Discover What Employees Fear LosingAI
In thirty-one years of running hotels, I have learned that a building tells you how it is feeling long before anyone files a report. You can hear it in the way the lobby doors are opened in the morning. You can see it in how people carry their trays. When the new systems went live at our resort last year, the building went quiet, and I knew before the first dashboard was ever opened that something in it was frightened.
I will be honest about my own part. I was the one who signed the contract with the IT company. Head office had been asking for efficiencies for three years, and the numbers in the proposal were persuasive: faster hiring, smarter rosters, fewer errors, lower costs. I believed most of it, and I still do. What the proposal did not contain was a line about what it feels like to be fifty-eight, or sixty-one, or sixty-five, and to be told that the thing you have done well since before your colleagues were born can now be done by a screen.
I first noticed it in one of our employees (let’s call her Alice), our human resources manager. She had been with the hotel for twenty-six years, and she was the closest thing the place had to a conscience. After the training session, she did not ask a single question, and I have known her to question a fire drill. I watched her at the next three management meetings and saw a woman making herself small, her hands folded over a notebook as if it were a life raft. Her camera stayed off during the practice sessions. Her name was missing from the usage reports. She had stopped offering opinions, and an Alice without opinions is a hotel with a leak in the roof.
I will admit that my first instinct was to do nothing. Managers are trained to be suspicious of kindness that cannot be measured. Head office was sending me adoption targets every week, and Alice’s department was at the bottom of the table. It would have been easy to send her a firm email about expectations. I wrote one, in fact, and kept it in my drafts for two days. On the third day, I deleted it and walked up the stairs instead.
What I said to her that afternoon was clumsy, but I meant it. I told her nobody was timing her, and that I did not want a department that was fast; I wanted one that was wise. I postponed her targets until the new year and told head office that I would answer for the figures myself. Then I went back to my office and waited to see whether I had made a mistake, because a manager who protects someone is also a manager who is wagering something.
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