The 2026 midterms made one thing clear: Voters are “mad at” AI, as political strategist Rob Flaherty put it.
On the podcast Machine Gods, Flaherty notes that “the story people are saying to themselves is, ‘This thing is in my backyard. It is being used to train stuff that’s gonna take my job away, and I get no say over any of this, and I’m really mad about that.’” An NBC exit poll found that 56% of voters said that AI and data centers were a “crucial or major factor” in their vote for Congress.
It’s obvious that people hate data centers. But workers resent AI rollouts in their workplaces, too. Data tracked on Blood in the Machine shows office worker sentiment toward AI dropped from 81% positive in 2019 to just 43% positive (with 53% negative) by 2026, listing “force-fed tools” as a major grievance. A Gallup global study reported that 74% of Americans are worried about AI, driven by widespread anxiety over job obsolescence and automated layoffs.
These voters are American employees, many of whom are being asked by their employers to “transform” their work lives with AI. You might be thinking: How can someone who voted against fast-moving AI on Tuesday be open and willing to experiment with AI at scale in their work lives? The answer is they can’t. We have a negative bias towards uncertainty, and our AI future is the ultimate uncertainty. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. And as we saw in the election, voters said, “Slow down.”
American employers need to deal with this fact. That doesn’t mean voters—or employees—hate AI. For most of us, AI offers a fundamental paradox: There’s a lot we like about generative AI, how it helps our daily lives. And we are fearful of it. We have to hold that duality.
This matters deeply to any manager or leader who wants their company to adopt AI at scale. When people are fearful and conflicted, they want to find safety. This means we resist change, or we act out against it. “An April 2026 survey of 2,400 knowledge workers across the U.S., U.K., and Europe—including 1,200 C-suite executives—conducted by Writer and Workplace Intelligence found that 29% of employees admitted to actively sabotaging their company’s AI strategy, a figure that jumps to 44% among Gen Z workers,” writes Fortune. It’s very hard to be open, innovative, and experimental when you fear for your future.
Nothing about the election results says stop AI entirely. It says, “Pause and let’s please talk about this.” This has to happen at work, too. In this article, I share how to get started, with two key questions.
Why can’t people change?
I spent decades as a political and advocacy consultant, and clients always asked me the same thing: Why won’t people change their behavior? Why don’t they vote for the candidates who support their interests? Why don’t they exercise? Why won’t they support a policy that will save them money and improve their health? Here’s what I learned, and science backs me up: You can’t change behavior when people are stuck. So why do people get stuck?
- Change feels dangerous, and it’s safer to stay where you are.
- We’ve built an “immunity to change.”
In Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change framework, the idea is that when we can’t make a change we genuinely want, it’s usually not a willpower problem. It’s because some part of us is committed—quietly, even unconsciously—to the opposite. Kegan calls this a psychological immune system. It has one foot on the gas and one on the brake.
When change feels unsafe, our brain, nervous system and body will conspire to keep us in the status quo. After all, its job is to keep us safe. Often, our psychological immune system is run by anxiety. Anxiety is a response to threats we anticipate.
Change with AI came too fast, too soon, too much, which creates a threat response in humans. We freeze, fight, or flee. In his new book, Our Existential Advantage, Enrique Rubio argues that every major technological revolution teaches the same lesson: Things change. Historically, though, the change came slowly enough for society to adjust. The printing press spread knowledge across Europe and helped spark the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but that took decades. AI is just as transformative, and it’s happening almost overnight. Because the change is so fast, the structures built on the old technology can’t keep up, and nor can we. As a result, many people despair that AI is something that’s happening to us, that it’s inevitable and we don’t have any agency over it.
We feel anxious about AI for very good reason. It threatens our safety, our livelihoods, our children’s futures, our values, and the meaning that we find in work. I’ve heard from employees who resent AI for siphoning off creativity and expertise, or think that it encourages sloppiness or laziness. We work for many different reasons. Although money is important, humans highly value agency at work, and we need meaning and purpose. When we give decisions to AI, what happens to core values like self-reliance, learning, or usefulness? The scholar Ziyaad Bhorat proffers three important abilities that individuals and communities have already identified as worth protecting from AI: work, knowledge and understanding, and decision-making. He writes that work is worth protecting, as is the right to keep our skills from atrophying and from being substituted by machines.
On Election Day, voters took back agency over AI. Their employers need to listen, and it starts with having a different kind of conversation about AI and work.
How to have the right AI conversations
Recently I was a guest on Changing Conversations, a podcast hosted by Katherine Cotter and Stig Albertsen, who lead organizational transformation work at the consultancy Implement. We discussed the opportunity leaders have right now to start conversations with their teams that understand the fundamental paradox of AI, and offer space and time to explore it. These conversations don’t need to have clear next steps and a defined outcome; they simply need to happen.
We are having technical conversations about AI: the opportunity, where to focus, how to roll out transformation and increase proficiency. There’s a real sense of FOMO with AI, a real sense of you’ve got to get with the program. A lot of people feel like admitting any sense of hesitancy or fear might make them weak. They worry that asking questions about AI rollouts might cause them to be viewed as un-innovative, which is ironic, because when you’re feeling stuck, you’re not as innovative. So the key is to get unstuck, and that means digging into our emotions around what AI means to us.
AI brings up a lot of emotions, and most of us are uncomfortable with emotions at work. That’s why this stuff is so important: When you don’t feel your emotions, you can’t make the best decisions. I want people to make good decisions. So I want them to sit for a minute and have this conversation, because when we’re able to name difficult emotions, understand them, and move through, we are able to create change, innovation, and great new things. The threat diminishes and we see a way forward. We regain our agency.
And it can start by asking two simple questions: “When I think of my craft, what makes me feel proud, fulfilled, purposeful?” and then “Does the implementation of AI change anything about this?”
I like to ask people to think of the parts of their craft and work that they really love to do, and that they feel mastery over. For most people, this is a good feeling. When we think about our craft, we feel proud, and we feel a tremendous sense of agency because we have worked hard to master something valuable. And when we then unpack how AI relates to our craft, it can bring up a lot of questions. It can remind us where AI is aligned with our values, and where it’s not. It can make us think about whether AI threatens our craft, or can enhance it, or both. This conversation opens up room to explore more deeply the question of what our AI future means for us.
I think AI gives us an opportunity to face what many of us see as an existential threat and to move through that. That’s how we gain control. Stig noted, “AI…holds an invitation to figure out what is the uniqueness of being human, or even what is my unique gift…. Part of what I do can be handled by other means and supporting tools and technology, and that’s an invitation for me to figure out: What is it that cannot be distributed to someone else, because only I can do that with that specific flavor?”
Questions to ask yourself and your team
I asked Stig: After all the years you’ve been doing this work, what’s the piece of your craft you love most, the thing you’re really good at? Try that yourself, and see what comes up. Sit with it; don’t rush to solve it!
Here are some more helpful questions to ask yourself and your team:
- What do I love about AI? What has surprised me?
- What parts of my job do I dislike and wish AI would take?
- What parts do I love and never want AI to touch? Why do they matter so much?
- What scares me about AI?
- What values are underneath all of that?
A few things I’ve learned from running these conversations: The leader goes first, and admits their own messiness. Expect the first few minutes to feel weird; people often look at me blankly until we get to their values or their kids, and then it clicks. Don’t attach a productivity goal. And make room for both/and, as the scholar Wendy Smith would put it. The most common thing I hear is some version of: I love it, it helps me so much, and I’m really worried about my kids.
People are relieved to learn they’re not the only ones holding both. The conversation is the most important part. There are no right or wrong answers, only the beginning of getting unstuck and moving through change.
