Fear is why the ROI of AI is DOA

Written By Michael Quinn

Most brands have adopted GenAI tools. Yet the ROI, famously, lags far behind. Recent research suggests the reason is fear.

Psychological fear: Workers fear being seen as lesser for their heavy use of AI. When AI use is visible to management and colleagues, workers tend to use it less, 25% less.

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To resolve this: 1. Integrate AI use seamlessly into workflows, standardize it to make it both invisible to others and assumed. 2. Build 2-way ongoing communications to channel anonymous worker feedback to management about what is blocking their use of AI.

Economic fear: Workers fear being replaced by someone who uses AI better. By using it publicly, they are setting the bar for “better”. So avoiding public use creates internal resistance and suppresses ROI – another reason why most AI pilots lose momentum.

To resolve this: 1. Invest in constant education, not top-down or home-grown, but a system of continuous learning and incentives that reward collaboration and proficiency. 2. Champion AI ethics, celebrate new skills, profile new tools (safely, approved by IT), and streamline and clarify governance, to help every worker participate in a culture of resilience, safety, and productivity with AI.

Fear of Skills Atrophy: Experienced workers find their pre-AI skills have dulled after working some time working with AI. While this effect is visited on individuals, the cause is often systemic. For example, soft-skills rooted in empathy that are essential for presenting ideas – especially in competitive situations -- disintegrate when AI writes and organizes a pitch. Or the rigor required for Board member preparation and oversight can diminish when AI is enlisted to retain, brief and recommend governance decisions.

To resolve this: Build a system that rewards workers for quality AI collaboration, not the expediency of AI dependence. Assign roles (including mentors). For example, mandate all AI processes have a human-in-the-loop who, by exercising their pre-AI skills and contextual awareness, is qualified to be responsible for the quality of AI output. Or create and reward internal competitions of case-studies or artwork produced through AI collaborations.

All brands are grappling with the cultural, organizational, commercial and ethical implications of using AI. That is a lot of new territory to navigate in the race for ROI and growth. Brands that acknowledge the fear that top-down transformation engenders in workers are that much closer to addressing it, making their investments in AI more focused on efficient positive innovation than brands clinging to the dark joke: “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”

And now, the AI headlines and research for Boards and Brand Leaders

Security & Cyberespionage

  • A.I. Agents Usher in a New Era of Cyberespionage www.nytimes.com

  • Hidden AI Whispers: How Researchers Are Gaming Peer Review with Secret Prompts WebProNews

Workforce, HR & Management

Marketing & Advertising

  • ADWEEK Brand Advantage: CMOs Are Finally Turning AI Into Real Results www.adweek.com

  • AI AMA: How Deep Learning is Rewiring Advertising www.adweek.com

  • EXCLUSIVE: Yahoo Is Testing 6 AI Agents for Advertising, Leaked Slides Show www.adweek.com

  • AI Ad Agents Unleashed: Amazon and Google’s Bidding Battle Reshapes $1T Market WebProNews

  • Gartner: AI agents fail to ease CMO pain amid need for deeper shifts Marketing Dive

Enterprise Strategy & Business Trends

  • The Real AI Bottleneck Is Organizational Reinvention, Not Computing Power Forrester

  • IBM: Data silos are holding back enterprise AI AI News

  • AI is reshaping how McKinsey makes money Business Insider

  • Deep Dive into McKinsey’s The State of AI in 2025: From “Everyone Using AI” to “A Few Using It Well” Medium

  • Gartner finds European tech execs opting for sovereign solutions Mobile Europe

  • Accenture and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo Invest in AI Marketing Startup The Wall Street Journal

Product, Tools & Prompt Engineering

  • NotebookLM adds Deep Research and support for more source types Google

  • Transform how your organization operates with Claude claude.com

  • LinkedIn adds AI-powered search to help users find people TechCrunch

  • Prompt Engineering Welcomes The ‘Collab Prompting’ Technique That Turns AI Into Your Collaborative Partner Forbes

  • Why Your SWOT Analysis Is Probably Useless: The AI Template That Changes Everything DEV Community

  • Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation minimaxir.com

Finance & Commerce

  • Visa Expands Visa Intelligent Commerce Across Asia Pacific, Prepares for AI Commerce Pilot by Early 2026 www.visa.com.sg

Legal, Risk & Reliability

Michael Quinn
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