Nearly a third of your team are sabotaging your adoption of AI.
Some refuse to use the tools. Some feed sensitive data into unapproved ones. Some fiddle with the performance metrics to make the tech look worse than it is. Plenty more simply don't engage - they let it sit there and wait for it to go away.
That comes from Writer and Workplace Intelligence's 2026 enterprise AI survey, published in April: 2,400 workers across the US, UK and Europe, 29% admitting to some form of sabotage. Among Gen Z, the figure climbs to 44%.
Before anyone sighs and utters, "kids today, eh?", it's worth remembering none of this is new.
In 1911, Frederick Taylor - the godfather of time management - coined the phrase 'systematic soldiering' to describe workers deliberately slowing output to resist new ways of working. Taylor was advising steel mill owners in Pennsylvania but he could have been talking to digital marketing leaders in Slough.
The tech is here. The prize is real: faster cycles, more consistency, better output from smaller teams.
Then, as now, leaders were under pressure to cut costs - and shiny new tech makes a tidier story for owners than faltering growth. Then, as now, workers read the room. And the subtle sabotage begins.
But the parallel stops there. Taylor's answer was to increase scrutiny on the people making the widgets. That won't cut it now.
This time we're dealing with knowledge workers, not manual labourers. There is human value here - judgement, craft, creativity - that doesn't improve through bean-counting and time-and-motion studies. Watch knowledge work more closely and you don't get more of it. You get people who feel watched.
At Committed Citizens, we think there's a better answer: Everybody gets a jetpack.
AI becomes the thing that lifts what good people already do. It propels them rather than replacing them. The companies that pull ahead won't be the ones stripping out human capital - they'll be the ones amplifying it. Same people, more altitude.
So the 29% isn't a workforce problem to be policed. It's a leadership one. The job is to galvanise a team into believing the technology is aimed at their work, not their jobs.
Sabotage is drag. The alternative is momentum.
If you’re not sure how to get the best out of a marketing team going through change, speak to us about Waypoint - a free, 60-minute conversation about where friction is costing you the most and what to tackle first.