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The Leadership Blind Spot That’s Killing Your AI Strategy

If you’re a GTM leader who thinks roughly 30% of your team is using AI, I have uncomfortable news: 93% of white-collar professionals are already using it. That’s not a typo. That’s the finding from Ken Roden’s doctoral research at Temple University, surveying 200 professionals with statistically significant results

The gap between what’s actually happening and what leadership perceives is now the single biggest barrier to AI execution. And it gets worse.

The Real Reason Your AI Pilots Are Failing

Every headline screams that 95% of AI pilots are failing. MIT published research. Consultants are writing case studies. Everyone assumes the problem is employee resistance, inadequate technology, or change management failures.

They’re all wrong.

Ken’s research reveals the actual failure point: employees don’t trust their leadership’s vision for how AI will be implemented. It’s not that people won’t use AI - they’re already using it extensively. It’s that they don’t believe leadership understands what they’re doing or has a coherent strategy for scaling it.

Think about what that means. Your team is running shadow AI operations right now. They’re using ChatGPT, Claude, and dozens of other tools to do their jobs better. But when you announce your official AI initiative, they don’t trust it enough to adopt it at scale.

Key Quotes That Reveal the Pattern

On the confidence-competence gap:

“There was definitely a correlation between people who said they use AI regularly and them saying that I am confident in my abilities to use AI. And I would say that’s dangerous. Because what, to your point exactly, you might think you’re good at this, but you’re actually maybe not as good as you think.”

On what’s actually working:

“The stuff that works, the people have the most success with, it’s the most boring stuff. It’s how do we get data from our Slack channel about customer insights into Salesforce... One of the most interesting use cases I saw... saved 20 hours a week per rep.”