THIS MONTH'S FIELD SIGNAL

The Involvement Illusion

This month's issue is a little different, because this summer I did something I've been wanting to do for a while: I stepped back from my usual work to do some dedicated listening. Over six weeks, I held in-depth conversations across ten organizations, from a thousand-person nonprofit to global enterprises, asking one question ten different ways: where is the human side of AI adoption actually landing in your organization?

The same pattern surfaced in nearly every conversation. Not one person described human resources (HR) being formally invited to lead the human side of AI adoption. Where HR had real influence, nobody offered that role—they had to claim it themselves. And in almost every case, the leaders above them believed the work was already being handled.

I've started calling this the involvement illusion: the confidence at the top that someone owns the human side of AI adoption, held right alongside the knowledge, one level down, that no one does. Research confirms the pattern: 60 percent of C-suite leaders say HR is involved in AI strategy from the outset. Only 30 percent of HR leaders say they were. (Source: Beamery)

Here is why this matters if you are leading an AI rollout. A rollout run as a technology deployment optimizes for what technology deployments optimize for: access, licenses, training completion, usage rates. Those are measurable, but they are not where adoption stalls. It stalls at the manager who can't answer what does this mean for my team's work, and at the employee who reads silence about their role as a warning. And those questions don't reach a deployment plan unless someone with people-side expertise puts them there.

Which raises the harder problem: the need doesn't go away just because nobody was assigned to it. Adoption still depends on someone building the narrative, equipping the managers, and earning the trust it runs on. Sometimes that work gets absorbed by whoever is closest to it and cares enough to catch it, informally, on top of an existing job—and without the authority to do it well. Sometimes nobody catches it at all. Neither of those is a plan, and from the top they look the same.

And here’s why it matters if you’re in HR waiting for an invitation to the table that likely won’t come: It’s worth considering what gets decided while you wait. AI adoption is going to redefine roles, reshape teams, and change what "qualified" means across whole job families. That is workforce design, and it is happening now, inside decisions being framed as tool selection. A seat at the table isn't about standing. It's about shaping the change before it arrives fully formed.

I go deeper on the pattern, and what it costs organizations, in this month's companion piece on Medium: The Involvement Illusion.

FROM THE FIELD

A Real-World Example

A regional human services organization reached the one-year mark of its AI implementation this summer. A year of systems work, integration, and rollout planning. And in all that time: no communication strategy, no training plan, no change support. The function that once housed change management was dismantled years ago. The policy being drafted in a strategy office has quietly become the stand-in for an actual strategy.

So a communications leader is stepping into the gap. Not because anyone asked her to, and not because it's in her job description, but because she can see what's coming: a workforce encountering AI in their daily tools with no story about why, no guidance about how, and a new chief executive arriving soon with strong views about AI and no orientation yet to what's been left undone.

What stayed with me was the mix in her voice when she described taking it on. Resolve, mostly. But alongside it: "I don't want to do this alone."

She isn't wrong to hesitate. The work she's claiming is bigger than one function. But someone has to catch it, and in her organization, the involvement illusion means everyone above her believes it's already caught. 

QUESTIONS FROM THE TRAIL

Ask Yourself

1. If you asked your C-suite who owns the human side of AI adoption, and then asked that person, would the answers match?

    

2. What decisions about AI in your organization were made before anyone responsible for people, narrative, or change entered the room?

3. Be honest: is your involvement in your organization's AI effort shaping decisions, or cleaning up after them? 

ONE SMALL STEP

The Report

The full synthesis report from my listening tour is ready, and readers of this newsletter get it first. It covers eight findings, from why manager adoption predicts team adoption almost one to one, to why training completion doesn't predict usage at all, plus what it all means for anyone responsible for the people side of AI. It's written to be shared, so if it resonates, pass it along to the person in your organization who needs it.

Field Notes from the AI Trailhead is drawn from real conversations with leaders navigating AI adoption. Names and details are anonymized; patterns are not.

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