people whose institutional memory tends to be the difference between a good decision and an expensive mistake, much like the engineers Ford eventually had to call back.
Separate research paints a similarly uneven picture inside company walls. One industry survey found that leadership itself is divided on whether its own workforce is ready, with technology chiefs far more confident in employee readiness than the operations leaders who actually watch the daily friction unfold. The same research found that only a small fraction of executives consider workforce enablement and change leadership to be an essential skill for thriving in an AI driven environment, even though training was identified as the most underfunded area of AI investment. Somewhere between the press release announcing an AI transformation and the actual desks where employees sit, the plan quietly falls apart.
A workplace survey covering the United States found that roughly fifty four percent of professionals said their employers were not providing adequate AI training, a figure that held steady across generations from Gen Z to Gen X. An HR consultant interviewed for that study offered a blunt diagnosis. Employees are not struggling with AI itself so much as with employers unwilling to properly equip them for it. That distinction matters. It reframes what looks like resistance as something closer to abandonment. Nobody hands a new employee the keys to a delivery van on their first day without training and calls it a management strategy. Yet that is essentially what many companies are doing with AI, minus the keys and minus the training.
None of this is an argument against artificial intelligence. It is a case for sequencing, humility, and respect for the people who actually do the work. Tools change fast. Trust does not. When a CEO announces a sweeping AI mandate without first understanding how the technology functions well enough to model it for their own team, they are asking employees to solve a puzzle the leader has not attempted themselves. That is not innovation. It is delegation of risk downward, dressed up as progress.
Real transformation, the kind Ford eventually stumbled into by accident rather than design, looks less like a mandate and more like a partnership. It means pairing new systems with the people who already understand the work deeply enough to know when the system is wrong. It means training that matches the actual tasks employees face
each day, not a generic webinar buried in an intranet nobody opens. It means giving teams the time and psychological safety to experiment, fail small, and improve, rather than threatening their livelihood if they do not master a tool overnight.
The companies that get this right will not be the ones who moved first, but the ones who moved with care, who treated their employees as partners in the transition rather than obstacles to route around. Ford learned this lesson the expensive way, after years and hundreds of millions of dollars in warranty costs. Other companies still have the chance to learn it the cheaper way, by simply listening to their people before the machines finish teaching them the hard lesson themselves.
Wafula Meshack is a Communication Specialist, Creative Writer and Associate Researcher at DIMLIS Africa and Kavod International. You can commune with him via on this or related matters via email at: Wafulameshack010 @ gmail. com.
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