The AI Roadblock In Our Heads

Daniel Goleman is author of the international best-seller Emotional Intelligence and Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. He is a regular contributor to Korn Ferry. 

AI can identify precise interventions for cultural transformation, optimize logistics, and surface solutions that span multiple domains. Anyone who has used this technology as a strategic partner knows it is overflowing with ideas for action.

Welcome to the age of the supercomputer—where AI can model a thousand futures before most of us finish a cup of coffee. Whether this tool is always right is another question. Hence the growing case for discernment—what we might call one of the most important skills of the new era. When a machine can tell you which strategies to pursue, which systems to upgrade, and even what to eat for dinner, it becomes dangerously easy to believe the world can be solved in a nanosecond.

But even the best plans or strategies won’t matter if people, teams, and communities can't change.

You can see this in the adoption of AI itself: 98% of business leaders want to adopt AI and leverage its full capacity within their organizations, but only 10% have generative AI models in production. And although 76% of workers feel urgent pressure to become AI experts, only 33% actually use the tool in their daily work.

This is the paradox of now. We have more data, more computing power, and more sophisticated problem-solving tools than ever before in human history. And still, we remain blocked from making changes we say we want to.

Like so many change experts will tell you, knowledge isn’t the bottleneck—the bottleneck is human behavior.

Harvard researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this phenomenon "immunity to change." Their research reveals that when we fail to follow through on our stated goals—whether personal, organizational, or societal—it's rarely due to lack of motivation or information. Instead, we are held in place by hidden, competing commitments beneath our conscious awareness. This is most evident in how many companies use the language of innovation, even though they remain averse to the vulnerability and risk of failure it entails. Or in leaders who earnestly want to empower their team, but remain committed to keeping every detail under their own control. Climate change offers another stark example: Millions want to protect the planet, yet remain wedded to routines that make modern life convenient.

Kegan and Lahey describe immunity to change as an invisible force field that keeps us locked in place no matter how much we intellectually or emotionally want to move forward. This force field is something AI cannot remove. It can generate insights, question biases, and illuminate certain blind spots, but it cannot dissolve the psychological defenses that make change feel threatening.

That takes emotional intelligence (EI), a quality only humans can cultivate. The antidote to resistance to AI lies in an EI-based competence: adaptability. People who excel in this specific talent are more flexible and better able to leverage new tools like AI. Adaptability can be learned, and boosting this capacity to change would no doubt help people make better use of an innovative tool like AI.

Another emotional-intelligence ability that helps here is self-awareness. To be self-aware means to understand the beliefs, fears, and motivations that shape how we show up. Without it, we stay blind to the very forces that keep us from acting on brilliant ideas and sensible solutions. In other words, without emotional intelligence, “even the best laid plans go to waste.”

This is why so many AI adoption efforts fall short. Organizations invest in training, incentives, executive sponsorship, and experimentation time: important levers that address surface-level barriers like skill, access, and permission. Yet they rarely address the deeper psychology and what is actually at stake. For many workers, AI threatens a core emotional need: to be indispensable. Indispensability is how many learn to feed their families and secure their future.

Beneath the surface lies a question too few leaders are asking explicitly: Why would employees enthusiastically adopt a tool they fear could jeopardize their livelihood?

The irony is profound. We have created machines that can think faster and process more information than any human in history. But the work that matters most—understanding your own immunity to change, examining your competing commitments, and developing the emotional intelligence to actually transform—remains profoundly and unequivocally human. Until we do that work, all the AI in the world won't move us forward.

Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon

Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.