Imagine you’re the VP of Customer Operations at a mid-sized insurance services company. Let’s call her Dana Whitfield. In two weeks, her team of forty claims processors goes live with a new AI triage tool. The business case is airtight. Leadership approved the budget. The vendor demo went smoothly. Dana has done everything a good rollout requires.
Except one thing. She hasn’t asked her team how they actually feel about it.
She decides to find out before the launch, not after. Instead of an all-hands announcement meeting, she sits down for fifteen-minute one-on-ones across her team. She’s using five questions I call the AI Trust Audit, and what she hears in those conversations tells her more than any dashboard can.
The exercise looks simple. It isn’t.
The first two questions go fine. When you ask what’s most draining about their week, people open up fast. Data entry, repetitive documentation, the parts of the job nobody loves. When you ask what part of their work makes them feel most human, a claims processor talks about the moment he calls a policyholder after a house fire and just listens before he explains anything. That’s not a task he wants automated. Now you know what to protect.
Then you ask about the rumors. And you learn something you didn’t know. Someone on the team heard, secondhand, that this rollout is phase one of headcount reduction. Nobody said that to you. Nobody would. But it’s already shaping how three of your best people are showing up to work.
By the fifth question, the one where you ask people to rate, one to ten, how much they believe this technology is being brought in to help them versus replace them, you get a six. Not a crisis. Not a green light either. Just data, and now it’s yours to act on.
Prosci’s own change research backs this up. Of the five stages employees move through during any change, the desire to actually embrace it is the one leaders most often assume will take care of itself once they’ve communicated the plan and modeled some enthusiasm. That assumption is what turns a six into a stalled rollout. Prosci: Why Your AI Rollout Stalled
This is where the real leadership work begins.
Here’s what a lot of leaders miss. Running this audit isn’t the hard part. Knowing what to do with a six is. Deciding whether to address the rumor directly in tomorrow’s team meeting or wait until you have more clarity is a judgment call with real consequences either way. Sequencing matters too. Ask these questions too early and you don’t have enough context to respond well. Ask too late and the rumors have already transitioned into belief.
And the audit only works if you close the loop. If Dana gathers this information and goes quiet for two weeks while she “figures out messaging,” she confirms the very distrust she was trying to measure. The employees who took a risk by telling her the truth will notice she didn’t act on it. That silence costs more than never asking at all.
This is the part of AI transformation that doesn’t show up in a project plan. It requires reading a room, calibrating a response, and following through in a way that actually rebuilds confidence instead of just checking a box. That’s not a communications task. It’s a leadership discipline, and it takes more than good intentions to get right.
Why this matters more than the technology
I built the AI Trust Audit as part of my Human Dividend framework because I kept seeing the same pattern. Organizations spend months perfecting the technical rollout and almost no time preparing for the human one. Then they’re surprised when adoption stalls, in ways that never show up as a formal complaint. Just slower engagement, more hesitation, less discretionary effort.
The leaders who get this right don’t treat trust as a soft metric to check in on later. They treat it as a leading indicator, something to measure and act on before the rollout, not after the damage is visible. That distinction is where fulfillment-centric leadership does its work: connecting a business initiative to the human experience of the people expected to carry it out.
If you’re preparing for an AI rollout of your own, the questions above are a starting point. Where it gets harder is in the follow-through: reading what a six actually means for your team, deciding how to respond to a rumor without overpromising, and building the kind of structured plan that turns a one-time audit into lasting trust.
That’s exactly what the Human Dividend Assessment is built to help you think through. It’s a 16 question diagnostic designed to give you a clear picture of where your people are on the journey to AI adoption and what areas need your leadership attention. It includes two consultations to facilitate delivery of a tailored report with specific action steps.
Explore the Human Dividend Assessment 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼
