Jenny Fernandez and Noam Bar-Lev open a recent Fast Company piece (February 2026) with this scene.
Dana had eight months to roll out AI tools to the marketing, sales, and customer success teams at a global B2B firm.
Legal had signed off. PR had signed off. Training was launched. The dashboards turned green.
The real work was happening somewhere else.
When deadlines hit, some of her teams tried the new tools for a short while, then went back to what they knew. Others clicked through the system just enough to keep the metrics green, while doing the real work on outside platforms that did the job faster and matched their actual processes.
The training had been completed. The behaviour hadn’t changed.
The line she used: “We didn’t have a resistance problem. We had a design problem.”
This pattern is not unique to her. BearingPoint’s 2025 study of 300+ managers across Europe and the US tells you why this keeps happening: 64% of organisations provide AI training. Only 35% have a structured change management programme to go with it.
Training teaches the tool. Nothing teaches the change.
The instinct is to read this as an argument for more change management. It isn’t. Even structured change programmes fail when the layer that has to execute them is being squeezed from both directions. Same delivery targets, more uncertainty, no added capacity. Middle managers have always carried the weight of transformation. AI made the weight heavier and the support thinner at the same time.
The gap that decides whether the rollout works isn’t technical. It’s the capacity of leaders to move people through a change with no instruction manual yet. To hold the discomfort without flinching. To translate a strategic mandate into workflow choices that survive contact with Tuesday morning.
That leadership capability has a name. It isn’t authority. It’s influence. The operational kind. The ability to shift behaviour in people who don’t report to you.
The question worth asking before adding another initiative is where you currently sit on that capacity.
The Influence Curve diagnostic takes five minutes.
In your experience, what actually moves people when training doesn’t?
Best regards, Brian