Show Notes
44% of Gen Z workers admit to actively sabotaging their company's AI strategy. They're submitting bad output on purpose. Leaking data into public tools. And 29% of ALL workers are doing this.
The easy take: they're afraid of losing their jobs. But that's not the real problem.
The real problem is the Control Trap. When you build an AI workflow, you're encoding YOUR brain into the system—then handing it to your team. You didn't ask how they work. You built it based on how YOU think it gets done. Now you're asking them to run a process that doesn't match their reality.
64% of executives use AI more than two hours a day. Only 28% of employees do. That gap is the problem. Leaders are building, experimenting, getting good at AI—then pushing output down to teams who weren't involved. "Here's what I built. Go do something with this."
The team didn't learn anything. They got handed a black box and told to feed their job into it. Of course they're resisting.
Scott shares his own story: working at an optical chain, growing revenue 30%, then suddenly two consultants show up with no explanation. "Where are we going with this?" When leadership doesn't explain the why, trust breaks down. Same thing is happening with AI.
The fix: Involve your team in the build. They live in the chaos every day. They know where the friction is. That institutional knowledge is the gold AI runs on top of. When they help design the system, they understand what AI is replacing (the broken process, not them), they become owners of the system instead of subjects to it, and they learn AI alongside you.
You can't automate chaos. And you can't hand chaos to your team and expect them to trust what you built.
The bottom line: 44% sabotage isn't an attitude problem. It's a trust problem. Build WITH your team, not FOR them.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:00)
Your team is sabotaging your AI efforts. Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you grow and scale your business. I'm Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven-figure businesses and this channel is here to help you do the same. Now, recently I read a study, a new study came out and it indicated that 44 % of Gen Z workers admit, they admit,
to actively sabotaging their company's AI strategy. It's not that they're not using it. And it's not like they're forgetting to log in. They are literally sabotaging it. They're submitting up into the company, they're submitting AI output that they know is bad, and they're not even trying to correct it. They're leaking proprietary information into public AI tools. And look, this isn't just a gen Z problem. The study found that 29 % of
all workers are doing this. Now, the easy take is that Gen Z is afraid to lose their jobs. I mean, that makes sense, right? And honestly, the study found that 30 % of them said that exact same thing, that, yeah, they're afraid of losing their jobs. I mean, who wouldn't be? But I've been studying business for a long time. And I want to tell you something. That's not the real problem. The real problem
is something that I see in almost every single business. Look, I work with a lot of businesses and I see the same thing happening over and over and over again. If you're deploying AI into your business right now, you need to hear this. What most business owners are doing, and you can swap business owners for leaders, managers, executives, just swap that term as I use it in this video. What they're doing is that they're rolling AI out in their company
And the way that they're doing it is the problem. And look, I'm not here to throw stones because I have done it this way too. We get excited about the tool. We get excited about what AI has to offer. And then we choose the tool. We then build workflows around it. And then we hand it to the team. And we say, here, use this. Does that sound familiar?
One of my friends, a lot of my friends are business owners, but one of my friends I was talking to recently, and he was all excited about AI. I mean, who isn't? Okay, if you're watching this video, you're excited about AI, you're interested about AI, but he's telling me about all the software he's creating for his business. He's not a software engineer. He's telling me about using it for editing videos. He's not a video editor. He is enjoying the technology.
He is loving AI, okay? He doesn't have any technical experience. mean, okay, maybe a little bit, but he's not a software engineer. He hasn't done these jobs. But AI gives all of us superpowers. It gives him a superpower. And what happens is we do this work, he creates some software, he gives it to his team, he's like, here.
I created this, do something with it. And then the team has to start running cycles to figure out like what to even do with it. So what happens is we have this strategy like, hey, things are working, but then the leaders, the executives are taking and creating these AI things, graphics, tools, content, they're dumping it back on their team.
or even workflows, automations, they're dumping it back on their team, they're giving their team more work to go do to figure out like, what do we even do with this thing? AI is giving everyone the ability to creep into other people's jobs. And before work was always separated. If you didn't know anything about accounting, you wouldn't do accounting work. But now with AI, we have the ability of venturing beyond our skill set.
Welcome to the control trap. And that's what it becomes. It becomes the control trap. Now I've talked about the control trap on this channel before. It's when all of the logic, all of the decisions, all of the logic lives in the leader's head. It lives with them. Okay? The owner, the leader, the executive, whoever is the brain of the whole operation and everything has to flow back through them. They become the linchpin of the business.
And again, this could just even be key employees. Okay. If you have somebody that is a linchpin of your business, that often becomes a bottleneck. But when you build an AI workflow, when you build it for your team, you're encoding your brain into the system and then you're handing it to your team. Okay. You didn't ask them how, how they work. You didn't ask them how the work actually gets done.
You built it based on how you think it gets done. And now you're asking your team to run a process that doesn't match their reality. The story they are telling themselves is that if, if you were able to design this thing and if it works, it makes their job look replaceable. Of course they're resisting. Who wouldn't resist? Okay.
This isn't a Gen Z problem. This is a control trap problem. And we just made it worse because the control trap can now move faster because we can now do things as leaders that we could never do before. And here's the number that actually explains what's going on. This number really kind of surprised me, but I can relate to it. 64 % of executives
are using AI more than two hours a day. Let that sink in for a minute. 64 % of us, I'm guilty of it, use AI for more than two hours a day. I mean, I'll be outside walking around the backyard talking on my phone. My wife will say to me, who are you talking to? And I look at her and I'm like, Claude, like, who else am I talking to?
I talked to Claude, he's my BFF. Now the flip side of that is that only 80, I'm sorry, the flip side of that is only 28 % of your employees use AI that much. Think about what that means. You're out there using AI to do things that used to require a team. You're building things, you're experimenting with it, you're getting good at it.
And then you're pushing that output down to the team. Hey, here's what I built. Go do something with this. The team wasn't involved. They didn't learn anything. They just got handed a black box and told, feed your job into it. Just do more with it. And look, all the AI hypers out there on social media, they don't help you or your team at all.
the people that are like, I've got all these AI agents. I don't need any employees. That doesn't help. That doesn't help you or your team. And I know there's this desire to build companies with less people. That's wrong. You need people to grow and scale your business. You really do. And yeah, tech can help. It can help you become more productive. It can help your team become more productive. But you still need people. I like to think about it like this.
If you were the last person, the last human on earth, you would have everything. You would be the richest person ever. Everything would be yours. All the planes, all the cars, every piece of like real estate, all the money, it's all yours. But the problem is, that you would be miserable. You're like, well, how would I be miserable, man? I got everything. Well,
place is going to start to break down. Okay. You're going to run out of things like who's going to grow the food. You can't grow the food. You can't do it all. Who's going to process and refine the oil. You can't do that. Okay. You can't do who's going to keep the lights on. You're to be sitting there in the dark and be like, is miserable. I need more people. Okay. You get it. I know you get it. Now here's what's more concerning.
Only 35 % of employees in this study said that their manager is even an AI champion. So now we have people within your organization that are supposed to be working with you that report to you and they're not using this stuff. And then you're looking for other employees to use it and there's a trust issue here because it's not getting pushed down within the organization.
This is why most executives, think 50 % of executives are saying, or 50 % of AI initiatives are not producing results because it's not getting adopted within the ranks of the company. And here's where it gets dangerous. Okay, this is where it really gets dangerous for any size company is that 67 % of executives, remember that's two thirds, and we're talking about all companies, all sizes.
believe their company has already suffered a data breach because an employee used an unapproved AI tool. That's what the resistance looks like in practice. See, they're not just not using the technology. They're going around you. The 44 % sabotage number is a trust problem. That's what it is. It's a trust problem. Your team is telling you something.
They're telling you they don't understand what this thing is replacing. And I'm not sure if it's replacing me. I didn't help to build it. I don't own it. What's happening here? And they're right to feel that way because you didn't give them the reason to feel otherwise. 25 years ago, I was...
put into a situation where I struggle to understand what the leader's motivations were. And if you've never been in that situation, it's really a difficult one. Here's what happened. I was working for a optical chain. I think we had 38 locations at the time. I was the general manager. And I was put in this role for nine months. We had grown revenues by 25%, 30%. The company was growing. Our strategy was working right off the bat. Things were great.
One random afternoon, I was called into a conference room and told, hey, meet these two consultants who are going to help with the strategy. Now, my strategy was working. It was my strategy. That's the job that I was hired into. The owners, they were like, yeah, just make us more money. I was making the company more money. And then all of a sudden, these two guys show up who want to start to ask about my strategy. They're digging into the company. They didn't really tell me what they were doing. The owners couldn't tell me what was happening here.
And all of a sudden it created stress for me and it created tension within the working relationship because it's like, where are we going with this? Okay. Like what's this all about? And all I was told is no, no, no, they just want to see how they can help. Well, we got a report out on how they could help, but then it was going to conflict against the strategy. It was already working and I had to go back and resell the strategy to the owners. Okay. So the lesson that I took away from that,
is that you always have to understand that we have to explain the bigger picture to our teams. We have to understand, like, if we're going to bring people in, if we're going to bring technology in, we have to understand or explain to them, this is what's happening and why. So before you deploy any AI tool to your team, you want them to be involved in the process, OK? Like, you don't want to build it for them. You can't build it for them. See, your team lives in
in the chaos every day. They live in it. They know where the friction is. They know where the steps in the work are unclear. They know the manual workarounds. They know that all. It's your institutional knowledge. And guess what? That's the gold. That's what AI is going to run on top of. That gold is what it's going to run on top of. When your team helps to design the system, a couple of things happen.
First, they understand what AI is actually replacing. The broken process, the frustrating process, not them. Second, they become the owner of the system, not subject to it. And that's important because remember, the one thing that you want as a business owner, as a leader, is you want freedom. Okay? You need the ability to go do the higher dollar strategy thinking, free time, whatever it is.
You don't want to own these processes. Third, when you work with them, guess what? They get to learn AI alongside of you. They're not being handed something that they never had any involvement in building. Okay? And you cannot, you just cannot dump this on them and expect, yay, we're going to love this thing. This is one of the things that I walk through in my scale framework. Okay? The very first step is to map the process
before you ever touch a because you can't automate chaos. But more importantly, you can't just hand chaos to your team and expect them to trust what you built. Remember the numbers. 44 % of Gen Z workers are sabotaging the AI, but 29 % overall. And these are the study's words, okay? Like these are the study's words and essentially what they said.
is that most AI strategy, about 75 % of AI strategy is more for show than actual internal guidance. Okay? Because that's so important because what happens is when the strategy lives in your head, okay, just like all the other decisions, your people know it. They can always tell when something is for show.
If you want your team to actually use the AI tools you're deploying, then you have to build the system with them first. Let them see what it's fixing, let them own a piece of it, and from there, that changes everything. If you have a question, I want you to head over to scottodd.net forward slash ask, and I will see you in our next episode.
Your team is sabotaging your AI efforts. Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you grow and scale your business. I'm Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven-figure businesses and this channel is here to help you do the same. Now, recently I read a study, a new study came out and it indicated that 44 % of Gen Z workers admit, they admit,
to actively sabotaging their company's AI strategy. It's not that they're not using it. And it's not like they're forgetting to log in. They are literally sabotaging it. They're submitting up into the company, they're submitting AI output that they know is bad, and they're not even trying to correct it. They're leaking proprietary information into public AI tools. And look, this isn't just a gen Z problem. The study found that 29 % of
all workers are doing this. Now, the easy take is that Gen Z is afraid to lose their jobs. I mean, that makes sense, right? And honestly, the study found that 30 % of them said that exact same thing, that, yeah, they're afraid of losing their jobs. I mean, who wouldn't be? But I've been studying business for a long time. And I want to tell you something. That's not the real problem. The real problem
is something that I see in almost every single business. Look, I work with a lot of businesses and I see the same thing happening over and over and over again. If you're deploying AI into your business right now, you need to hear this. What most business owners are doing, and you can swap business owners for leaders, managers, executives, just swap that term as I use it in this video. What they're doing is that they're rolling AI out in their company
And the way that they're doing it is the problem. And look, I'm not here to throw stones because I have done it this way too. We get excited about the tool. We get excited about what AI has to offer. And then we choose the tool. We then build workflows around it. And then we hand it to the team. And we say, here, use this. Does that sound familiar?
One of my friends, a lot of my friends are business owners, but one of my friends I was talking to recently, and he was all excited about AI. I mean, who isn't? Okay, if you're watching this video, you're excited about AI, you're interested about AI, but he's telling me about all the software he's creating for his business. He's not a software engineer. He's telling me about using it for editing videos. He's not a video editor. He is enjoying the technology.
He is loving AI, okay? He doesn't have any technical experience. mean, okay, maybe a little bit, but he's not a software engineer. He hasn't done these jobs. But AI gives all of us superpowers. It gives him a superpower. And what happens is we do this work, he creates some software, he gives it to his team, he's like, here.
I created this, do something with it. And then the team has to start running cycles to figure out like what to even do with it. So what happens is we have this strategy like, hey, things are working, but then the leaders, the executives are taking and creating these AI things, graphics, tools, content, they're dumping it back on their team.
or even workflows, automations, they're dumping it back on their team, they're giving their team more work to go do to figure out like, what do we even do with this thing? AI is giving everyone the ability to creep into other people's jobs. And before work was always separated. If you didn't know anything about accounting, you wouldn't do accounting work. But now with AI, we have the ability of venturing beyond our skill set.
Welcome to the control trap. And that's what it becomes. It becomes the control trap. Now I've talked about the control trap on this channel before. It's when all of the logic, all of the decisions, all of the logic lives in the leader's head. It lives with them. Okay? The owner, the leader, the executive, whoever is the brain of the whole operation and everything has to flow back through them. They become the linchpin of the business.
And again, this could just even be key employees. Okay. If you have somebody that is a linchpin of your business, that often becomes a bottleneck. But when you build an AI workflow, when you build it for your team, you're encoding your brain into the system and then you're handing it to your team. Okay. You didn't ask them how, how they work. You didn't ask them how the work actually gets done.
You built it based on how you think it gets done. And now you're asking your team to run a process that doesn't match their reality. The story they are telling themselves is that if, if you were able to design this thing and if it works, it makes their job look replaceable. Of course they're resisting. Who wouldn't resist? Okay.
This isn't a Gen Z problem. This is a control trap problem. And we just made it worse because the control trap can now move faster because we can now do things as leaders that we could never do before. And here's the number that actually explains what's going on. This number really kind of surprised me, but I can relate to it. 64 % of executives
are using AI more than two hours a day. Let that sink in for a minute. 64 % of us, I'm guilty of it, use AI for more than two hours a day. I mean, I'll be outside walking around the backyard talking on my phone. My wife will say to me, who are you talking to? And I look at her and I'm like, Claude, like, who else am I talking to?
I talked to Claude, he's my BFF. Now the flip side of that is that only 80, I'm sorry, the flip side of that is only 28 % of your employees use AI that much. Think about what that means. You're out there using AI to do things that used to require a team. You're building things, you're experimenting with it, you're getting good at it.
And then you're pushing that output down to the team. Hey, here's what I built. Go do something with this. The team wasn't involved. They didn't learn anything. They just got handed a black box and told, feed your job into it. Just do more with it. And look, all the AI hypers out there on social media, they don't help you or your team at all.
the people that are like, I've got all these AI agents. I don't need any employees. That doesn't help. That doesn't help you or your team. And I know there's this desire to build companies with less people. That's wrong. You need people to grow and scale your business. You really do. And yeah, tech can help. It can help you become more productive. It can help your team become more productive. But you still need people. I like to think about it like this.
If you were the last person, the last human on earth, you would have everything. You would be the richest person ever. Everything would be yours. All the planes, all the cars, every piece of like real estate, all the money, it's all yours. But the problem is, that you would be miserable. You're like, well, how would I be miserable, man? I got everything. Well,
place is going to start to break down. Okay. You're going to run out of things like who's going to grow the food. You can't grow the food. You can't do it all. Who's going to process and refine the oil. You can't do that. Okay. You can't do who's going to keep the lights on. You're to be sitting there in the dark and be like, is miserable. I need more people. Okay. You get it. I know you get it. Now here's what's more concerning.
Only 35 % of employees in this study said that their manager is even an AI champion. So now we have people within your organization that are supposed to be working with you that report to you and they're not using this stuff. And then you're looking for other employees to use it and there's a trust issue here because it's not getting pushed down within the organization.
This is why most executives, think 50 % of executives are saying, or 50 % of AI initiatives are not producing results because it's not getting adopted within the ranks of the company. And here's where it gets dangerous. Okay, this is where it really gets dangerous for any size company is that 67 % of executives, remember that's two thirds, and we're talking about all companies, all sizes.
believe their company has already suffered a data breach because an employee used an unapproved AI tool. That's what the resistance looks like in practice. See, they're not just not using the technology. They're going around you. The 44 % sabotage number is a trust problem. That's what it is. It's a trust problem. Your team is telling you something.
They're telling you they don't understand what this thing is replacing. And I'm not sure if it's replacing me. I didn't help to build it. I don't own it. What's happening here? And they're right to feel that way because you didn't give them the reason to feel otherwise. 25 years ago, I was...
put into a situation where I struggle to understand what the leader's motivations were. And if you've never been in that situation, it's really a difficult one. Here's what happened. I was working for a optical chain. I think we had 38 locations at the time. I was the general manager. And I was put in this role for nine months. We had grown revenues by 25%, 30%. The company was growing. Our strategy was working right off the bat. Things were great.
One random afternoon, I was called into a conference room and told, hey, meet these two consultants who are going to help with the strategy. Now, my strategy was working. It was my strategy. That's the job that I was hired into. The owners, they were like, yeah, just make us more money. I was making the company more money. And then all of a sudden, these two guys show up who want to start to ask about my strategy. They're digging into the company. They didn't really tell me what they were doing. The owners couldn't tell me what was happening here.
And all of a sudden it created stress for me and it created tension within the working relationship because it's like, where are we going with this? Okay. Like what's this all about? And all I was told is no, no, no, they just want to see how they can help. Well, we got a report out on how they could help, but then it was going to conflict against the strategy. It was already working and I had to go back and resell the strategy to the owners. Okay. So the lesson that I took away from that,
is that you always have to understand that we have to explain the bigger picture to our teams. We have to understand, like, if we're going to bring people in, if we're going to bring technology in, we have to understand or explain to them, this is what's happening and why. So before you deploy any AI tool to your team, you want them to be involved in the process, OK? Like, you don't want to build it for them. You can't build it for them. See, your team lives in
in the chaos every day. They live in it. They know where the friction is. They know where the steps in the work are unclear. They know the manual workarounds. They know that all. It's your institutional knowledge. And guess what? That's the gold. That's what AI is going to run on top of. That gold is what it's going to run on top of. When your team helps to design the system, a couple of things happen.
First, they understand what AI is actually replacing. The broken process, the frustrating process, not them. Second, they become the owner of the system, not subject to it. And that's important because remember, the one thing that you want as a business owner, as a leader, is you want freedom. Okay? You need the ability to go do the higher dollar strategy thinking, free time, whatever it is.
You don't want to own these processes. Third, when you work with them, guess what? They get to learn AI alongside of you. They're not being handed something that they never had any involvement in building. Okay? And you cannot, you just cannot dump this on them and expect, yay, we're going to love this thing. This is one of the things that I walk through in my scale framework. Okay? The very first step is to map the process
before you ever touch a because you can't automate chaos. But more importantly, you can't just hand chaos to your team and expect them to trust what you built. Remember the numbers. 44 % of Gen Z workers are sabotaging the AI, but 29 % overall. And these are the study's words, okay? Like these are the study's words and essentially what they said.
is that most AI strategy, about 75 % of AI strategy is more for show than actual internal guidance. Okay? Because that's so important because what happens is when the strategy lives in your head, okay, just like all the other decisions, your people know it. They can always tell when something is for show.
If you want your team to actually use the AI tools you're deploying, then you have to build the system with them first. Let them see what it's fixing, let them own a piece of it, and from there, that changes everything. If you have a question, I want you to head over to scottodd.net forward slash ask, and I will see you in our next episode.