AI resistance: the carrot and the stick

The other day I watched a worker operating a mini excavator at breathtaking speed and with spectacular precision. A true virtuoso. I wondered: would he know how to do that work by hand? Probably not. But does it really matter?

Many professionals resist adopting AI out of fear of becoming deskilled. Of losing abilities cultivated over years. And that fear has a scientific basis: according to behavioral science, humans feel the pain of losing something — a skill, authority in a subject area — more intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent benefit ¹. Even tools explicitly designed to assist can feel like threats when they suggest that a professional’s knowledge is no longer indispensable ¹.

The fear is psychologically legitimate. But it is economically suicidal. Because it protects competencies whose market value is collapsing, while ignoring the new capabilities the tool makes possible. The question is not what you lose by using AI, but what you stop gaining by not using it. Protecting the ability to dig by hand does not prepare you for a world where there are only excavators.

We have been here before. When Ford introduced the assembly line, the technology was inherently deskilling: it turned craftsmen into parts assemblers. But Ford did not overcome resistance with the stick. He implemented the famous five-dollar day, doubling the industry’s average wage ². He turned his own workers into consumers capable of buying the product they made, aligning technological success with personal economic prosperity ³. He did not compel: he made resistance irrational.

A century later, Accenture chooses the opposite path. Its CEO announced that AI use is no longer optional, but a prerequisite for professional advancement ⁴. The firm tracks weekly logins across more than twenty internal tools ⁵. The result: symbolic, ritualistic adoption. Employees logging in to hit the metric without truly integrating AI into their workflow, while resistance goes underground.

The stick generates compliance. Only the carrot generates transformation.

The best strategy is not to punish those who don’t use AI. It is to design an ecosystem where using it is so obviously advantageous that refusing becomes naturally and organically falling behind. Not forcing: proposing, incentivizing, rewarding. Making the hand shovel look absurd next to the tractor. Like that mini excavator virtuoso: nobody asks whether he knows how to dig by hand. They admire what he can do with the machine.