AI Readiness Is A People Question
First in a series introducing the Euda AI Readiness Profile
By Keegan Evans
Somewhere in your organization right now, someone who is good at their job is asking: am I training my replacement?
This spring a Writer survey of 2,400 knowledge workers who already use AI at work showed what happens when that and other questions go unanswered: 29% of the employees admitted to sabotaging their company's AI strategy, and among Gen Z it was 44%. That can look like refusing the tools, using unapproved ones, or making the AI look worse than it is. Rather than an indictment of unreasonable people from any generation, we see both sides of that story behaving rationally when they aren’t properly equipped with the information they need to navigate the massive change happening all around us. Early-career workers are watching AI absorb the routine work their careers were supposed to be built on, and their executives, 60% of whom plan to lay off people who can't or won't use AI, are under pressure to show results. Fear drives resistance, resistance confirms leadership's assumptions, and pressure deepens the fear.
This behavior falls cleanly into AI adoption failure modes we’ve seen since we started this work: Paralysis, Shadow Use, and Resistance. Paralysis is the most expensive: teams are frozen between trying to do the right things and just get their job done with unclear direction. Shadow use is the hardest to see: capable people using AI in secret because admitting it feels riskier than hiding it, so the organization learns nothing from its own pioneers and quietly loses control of its confidential data. Resistance is the loudest: people pushing back against AI tools for many reasons. We developed our three AI Principles and The Euda Methodology to solve for the root causes: fear, confusion, uncertainty.
Most dangerous of all, your BI dashboard can't see any of them. Usage metrics measure the tool, not the person, and a sabotaging employee, a hidden power user, and a frozen team can all show up in the data looking roughly the same. When I flew my diciest missions through bad weather in a combat zone, I trusted our lives to my instruments. No single instrument told the whole story, and if I failed to scan all of them, I would miss a critical piece. Organizations adopting AI today are getting insight into usage, tokens, even workflows. But most are flying blind when it comes to the measurement that matters most: are your people and culture climbing into the future together, or about to crash head first?
So we built the instrument you need. The Euda AI Readiness Profile is a confidential assessment across your executive leadership, your managers, and your workforce, scored into Lift and Drag dimensions to give you a picture of how your organization is navigating AI. These dimensions give real clarity as to what’s lifting you up and what's holding you back, including the gap between what leadership believes is happening and what your employees are actually living. It reads the conditions that produce paralysis, shadow use, and resistance, and it shows you where to act first.
We’re launching this to a founding cohort at the end of the month. In the coming weeks I'll walk through the whole instrument here, piece by piece. I’ll talk about our Lift and Drag forces, and why drag isn't a defect. We’ll share details about the eight dimensions from curiosity and teamwork to who actually owns decisions. And how we help bundle this in our four readiness stages, the four kinds of people in every room you're trying to change, and what a full read of your organization looks like when it's done.
If you want a head start and to get on our wait list, there's a free version you can take right now. Three minutes, about ten questions, and a snapshot of your personal starting point.
Take the free Readiness Check →
In my next post: Lift and Drag in AI Adoption.