At a recent town hall, a Fortune 500 CEO told employees, “Don’t be afraid of AI taking your job. Be afraid of the person who knows more about AI than you.”

On the surface, it was a bold, forward-looking message. But for the people in the room, it was just confusing. A few weeks prior, middle managers had told employees they weren’t even allowed to use AI at work.

That contradiction left people—and any chance of a successful AI rollout—stuck.

This example is more than a slip of the tongue. It’s a cautionary tale of how change efforts can fracture when the wrong message is delivered at the wrong time. Without taking necessary precautions, your own AI rollout is in danger of stalling before it even begins. 

Why does cascading communication fail?

Leaders often assume that if they craft the perfect top-level message—polished, visionary, and repeated often—it will cascade down intact and drive change.

In reality, the message often stays intact, but it loses meaning along the way. A CEO might tell her executive team, “We need to adopt AI to stay ahead in a changing world.” At that level, the statement resonates. But by the time the same words reach a senior writer in Marketing, the message hasn’t changed, yet the meaning has vanished. The frontline employee is left wondering: “What the f#@! does that actually mean for me?”

With AI rollouts, resistance is even starker because it runs up against three common barriers to AI adoption:

• Fear about job security
• Ambiguity about ethical use and cognitive impact
• Inconsistent guidance 

Each of these barriers amplifies the chance of a breakdown. In this volatile environment, even the boldest vision can’t survive the journey from executives to the front line.

How to roll out AI successfully in your organization

AI rollouts don’t fail because leaders lack vision. They fail because vision alone doesn’t change behavior.

Adoption only happens when managers and employees can “localize” the message—translating strategy into the context of their own roles and making sense of it in their daily work. 

Drawing from client experiences, here are three ways to improve the odds of your organization’s AI rollout succeeding:

1. Give people agency, not scripts

Broad corporate goals from the top, like “AI = Opportunity,” may sound inspiring in the boardroom, but they don’t answer the most important employee question: “What’s in it for me?”

Consider one Fortune 100 technology company we work with. Facing the rapid impact of AI on both internal operations and customer expectations, leadership made a deliberate pivot to an AI strategy, framing it as a way to “strengthen the company.”

At the individual contributor level, though, the experience was far less inspiring. Within the Marketing team, that AI pivot meant roles were shifted, teams reorganized and several colleagues were laid off. For many, the script from leadership felt detached from their lived reality and the vision quickly fractured. Yes, the change had happened, but adoption hadn’t. 

The turning point came when leadership invested in giving their people agency. Instead of dictating how their lives would change, leadership astutely asked the 30 team members to begin crafting their own vision of the future, answering questions like: 

• How do I make the best of this new reality?
• What can I influence?
• How do I redefine my role in this new state?

As a result, people defined what the vision meant for themselves and their teams, identified how they could contribute to it, and started addressing early barriers. That process gave employees a sense of agency, and with it, the ability to identify a path forward. 

2. Equip the middle managers, not just the top

When leaders broadcast a vision without equipping managers to translate it, the message stalls in the middle.

At an American multinational technology company, sweeping modernization efforts led to an organization-wide restructure. At the top, the rationale made sense: these changes were vital to the organization’s long-term success. 

But for individual contributors, the reality looked very different. The restructure felt less “vital” and more like betrayal—friends were let go, influence was lost and suddenly they found themselves on new teams where they no longer knew their place.

This disconnect between top-down messaging and front-line reality is an example of the “missing middle” problem. Vision from the top doesn’t translate effectively on its own. A BCG study shows that when a Fortune 500 company trained middle managers to tailor change messaging to their teams’ needs and mindsets, adoption skyrocketed by 89%, significantly improving ROI.

In this tech company’s case, one mid-level manager stepped up for her organizational development team. She explained why the change was necessary at a global level while also acknowledging the difficulty her team was experiencing. That honesty created trust so her team could say: “It’s not what I would have chosen, but I see why it had to happen—and I see how I can adapt.”

She then brought the team into a two-hour workshop that helped them see where they had influence and gain tools to lead through change. Suddenly, what once felt like a change imposed on them became a future they had the tools and agency to actively shape.

3. Create two-way communication channels

Static, one-way communication leaves gaps that people quickly fill with fear or resistance, according to MIT Sloan Management Review. 

At one of the world’s largest online tourism and home-share services, leadership positioned generative AI as an exciting new capability to help better serve their customers. But when the message reached the marketing team, employees pushed back, labeling it as “cheating” in their line of work and dismissing it outright. Left unaddressed, the top-level script could easily have hardened into resistance.

Instead of shutting down the reaction or just saying, “You are expected to use this. Figure it out,” the leader invited dialogue. Together, they created time, space and training for employees to explore how AI could genuinely support their daily work through low-risk problem-solving. Then they were asked to voice how they wanted to use it and ask the questions that mattered most to them around AI, like: 

• “Does this replace what I do?”
• “Do I have the skills to use it?”
• “What does success with AI look like in my role?”

Listening to concerns and giving her team space to experiment, the leader turned resistance into ownership. The message was refined, skills grew and adoption followed.

The lesson is clear: alignment succeeds when messaging isn’t just cascaded but co-created.

How to accelerate real AI adoption 

The boldest script can set direction, but it won’t deliver adoption.

AI rollouts only stick when employees have agency, managers act as sensemakers, and messaging evolves in dialogue with the people living the change. The real measure of success isn’t how well the message cascades from the top, but how deeply it takes root across the organization.

That kind of resilience doesn’t happen by chance. It happens when every person is equipped to play a role in making change real and everyone becomes a change maker. And in today’s AI era, that’s the difference between a rollout that falters and a transformation that lasts.