What does "AI-first" even mean — and why does half your team resist it?

CONFERENCE THEME ALIGNMENT
This talk sits at the intersection of AI adoption and the future of work — two of the conference's core themes.
PROBLEM & RELEVANCE
Many organisations today claim to be "AI-first." But walk through the door and you find two parallel realities: a small group who have genuinely rewired how they work around AI tools, and a much larger group who nod along in meetings and then open the same spreadsheet they used five years ago. In regulated industries like healthcare, that gap has real consequences: delayed adoption, underused tooling, and AI investments that never reach scale. Resistance isn't laziness. Each group resists for different reasons, and a blanket "AI training" fixes none of them.
SOLUTIONS & INSIGHTS
Drawing on hands-on experience building AI literacy programmes, this session offers a practical framework for diagnosing where resistance actually comes from — and what to do about it. Attendees will see how to map their team's adoption landscape, why early adopters behave differently (and how to replicate that without mandating it), and what separates organisations that extract real value from AI from those that accumulate pilots that never scale.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Why "AI-first" fails as a mandate and what to say instead to different stakeholder groups
A simple diagnostic for mapping your team's resistance and which type is actually hardest to shift
What early adopters inside regulated organisations actually do differently and how to replicate it without forcing it