Leadership AI Commitments to Drive Adoption
Leadership AI Commitments to Drive Adoption
Your Leaders Support AI.
Ask Them What That Looks Like
Your leaders have had the conversations about AI. They agree it matters.
They’ve signed off on the strategy, funded the tools, shown up at the kickoff. By every traditional measure, you have leadership alignment.
And your people still aren’t adopting the way you expected.
Here’s a reason why:
Most organizations treat alignment as the finish line when it’s actually the starting line
Agreement on the importance of AI is not the same thing as specific, actionable leadership commitments that drive adoption.
And it’s the specific commitments, not the agreement, that your people actually experience.
Research on what AI demands of leaders confirms this. The Five Demands Model (Human + AI: A New Model for Change Leadership, Change Management Review and Project Pal AI, 2026) identifies five ways AI transformation fundamentally changes what leaders must do, including:
Sponsor a direction when there is no fixed end state.
Build trust as an architecture, not deliver it as a message.
Respond to concerns about identity and relevance, not just process disruption.
Each of these demands requires something specific and observable from leaders, something that agreement alone doesn’t produce.
When a senior leader says “We’re committed to AI” in a town hall, that’s alignment.
When that same leader can describe what she will specifically do, say, and show up for in trackable terms, that’s commitment.
The first Alignment creates awareness. The second is what moves people toward genuine adoption.
Prosci's research across more than 1,100 professionals confirms why the distinction matters.
The Perception Gap
Leaders consistently rate their own trust and comfort with AI significantly higher than frontline employees do.
Leaders are not being dishonest. They are projecting their own experience onto the organization, and that gap is exactly where alignment stops producing adoption.
Three gaps open when organizations stop at alignment
1. Leaders don’t know what’s specifically expected of them.
Senior leaders, middle management, and front-line supervisors all have distinct roles in AI adoption.
Alignment treats them as one audience who agreed on the same thing.
Specific commitments look different at each level, with named owners and tracked actions, because the leadership behaviors that move adoption depend on where you sit.
2. Managers get a coaching role without anyone addressing their own concerns first.
The change management field has always known managers need to adopt a change before they can support their teams through it.
With AI, the stakes are higher. Research consistently shows that managers carry disproportionate anxiety about AI’s impact on their own compensation and relevance.
These concerns are qualitatively different from what senior leaders or individual contributors experience.
Most organizations hand managers a support role without first acknowledging them as employees who are navigating uncertainty that is uniquely theirs.
3. Communications about AI get planned independently from the leadership engagement work.
The result is predictable: what leaders say in conversation doesn’t match what the organization communicates.
When your leadership engagement work feeds your communications framework directly, your people experience consistency instead of confusion.
What leaders commit to saying becomes the foundation of what gets communicated.
Where I come in
Most leaders genuinely want to support AI adoption. The challenge is turning that support into something specific.
I work with cross-functional teams to move leaders from agreement to defined commitments: what leaders at each level will specifically do, say, and show up for, with named owners and tracked actions.
The work is grounded in structured change management methodology adapted for what AI uniquely demands of leaders, and every session produces a tangible, immediately usable output.
Technology gets installed. People decide whether to adopt it.
If your leaders support AI but can’t describe what that looks like, let’s talk. → Contact Laurie Today