The licences are paid for. The rollout is done. The lunch-and-learn went great. Six months later, half your developers have never opened their AI assistant — and the other half paste its output into production without reading it. Sound familiar?
Here's the uncomfortable truth: AI adoption is not a tooling problem. It's a psychology problem. And the harder you push, the worse it gets. That's the “righting reflex” at work — our instinctive urge to fix other people's behaviour (“Just try it! It will make you faster!”),
which reliably deepens resistance instead of dissolving it.
In this session we'll dig into the psychology of why developers resist (or over-trust) AI tooling: threat responses to perceived deskilling, professional identity (“I am my code”), and loss of mastery. Then I'll introduce Motivational Interviewing — a method born in clinical psychology that has become one of the most effective ways to lead change — and show how reflective listening turns your loudest resisters into your loudest advocates.
You'll leave with a concrete, mandate-free playbook for guiding AI adoption on your team: what to say, what never to say, and how to hear the difference between resistance and legitimate concern.
No AI tool demos. Just the human operating system that decides whether any of those tools get used.