Employee AI Resistance, SMBs & GBP, Agencies ❤️ AI, AI Coach

Employee 'Resistance' to AI

Enterprises have loudly trumpeted AI but have generally been slow to implement it (vs. agencies and SMBs). There is a range of factors behind this, but one of them is employee pushback or resistance because of resentment or fear of job loss. There are various estimates about future AI job displacement. (Bill Gates holds an extreme view: only coders, energy experts, and biologists are safe.) However, a new report from AI enterprise tool Writer (n=800 C-suite executives and 800 employees) finds that almost a third of employees (especially Gen Z) are consciously undermining their companies' AI implementations. This may be part of a larger cultural pattern of employee disengagement, simply focused on AI. Gallup recently found that "employee engagement ... fell to its lowest level in a decade in 2024, with [the] percentage of actively disengaged employees at 17%."

The Writer survey says, "31% of employees say they’re sabotaging their company’s generative AI strategy. That number jumps to 41% for Millennial and Gen Z employees." That takes various forms, including "tampering with performance metrics to make it appear AI is underperforming, intentionally generating low-quality outputs, refusing to use generative AI tools or outputs, or refusing to take generative AI training." Many workers say they feel personally diminished by AI and are fearful of AI taking their jobs. But there are other objections to AI rollouts (graphic above). The report also documents other employee "passive-aggressive" behaviors. It concludes with a series of recommendations around better internal AI education, training and execution.

The survey also found significant disappointment with AI performance: "only around a third of the C-suite say they’ve seen a significant ROI with respect to employee productivity (36%), cost savings for their organization (36%), and revenue (32%)."

Only 24% of SMBs Using GBP

Trends among SMBs are fairly consistent – even globally: their challenges, preferred channels, even AI usage. A recent survey from Constant Contact and Ascend2 polled 1,600 small businesses (<100 headcount) in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand in business 5 years or less. Its findings confirm much of what we've found in our work. The biggest challenge is consistently customer acquisition, followed by a lack of resources (time, budget, skills), product/service differentiation, learning new tools/technologies, customer retention and a few others. The top marketing channel is social media followed by email and paid social. This is directionally consistent with our data (below).

The percentage of SMBs doing business profile/review management is only 24% in the Constant Contact survey vs. 43% in Dialog's findings. These low numbers suggest a lack of customer-journey understanding. The difference here is that Constant Contact used an international sample; Dialog's was US only and included larger SMB companies (<499 headcount), which have more resources. Dialog's top 3 SMB AI use cases were 1) marketing and sales, 2) product/service development, 3) customer service. Constant Contact's findings were pretty consistent: 1) content/campaign generation, 2) personalizing CX, 3) analyzing data to understand customers. Overall, 71% of Constant Contact respondents said they would be using AI in 2025, which is aspirational, 29% said they had no plan to.

News & Noteworthy

• Amazon unveils new shopping assistant, "Interests."
• Heard the term "vibe coding" but don't know what it is?
• Coders are increasingly reliant on AI to perform their jobs.
• Consulting firms may change billing models (i.e., hours) because of AI.
• AI could dramatically alter the value of "expertise."
• Full utilization of AI will require major organizational changes.
• People in finance still relying more heavily on Excel than AI.
• Gemini Live can now see your screen and interact with live video.
• How to be visible both in search and in LLMs.
• Anthropic/Claude using Brave to search the web.
• Claude judged best for writing emails among major LLMs (WaPo).
• AI-generated music cannot be copyrighted.
• SMBs increasingly pessimistic, consumer confidence at 12-year low.

Majority of Agencies Happy with AI

Digital agencies were some of the earliest AI adopters and continue to lead the market in many respects. An IAB-sponsored survey of "500 subject matter experts at agencies, brands, and publishers," focused on media buying and campaign implementation, finds that the majority are happy with AI performance across a range of measures. "Agencies and publishers are highly satisfied, with 70% or more saying [AI] meets or exceeds their expectations." Agencies and publishers lead brands, which have been more cautious in their rollouts because of multiple concerns (e.g., brand safety). Most of the AI adoption appears to be through major platforms, such as ChatGPT, and/or media buying platform AI tools, such as Google Smart Bidding. Seemingly in general accord with the Writer survey, 37% of employees in these industries are concerned about job displacement. Interestingly, however, it was the lowest of 17 "AI challenges" respondents chose from.

AI Coach: A New Sales Channel?

Multiple Dialog surveys explored respondents' interest in the idea of an AI business and/or life coach. Both consumers (69%) and small business owners (84%) were interested to varying degrees. We think in a couple of years there will be lots of AI coaches in the market. As an early case-in-point, Verizon launched what it calls an "industry first GenAI Assistant for small businesses." It's essentially a customer service bot that can answer customer questions in a more flexible and personalized manner. It's pitched as a way to "free[ ] up valuable time for business owners and employees." This has long been the promise of customer service chatbots generally but the actual experience always fell short. This is not exactly what we have been talking about, but it's a start down that path to something more like our coach concept.

We envision an AI that can answer a range of questions for the business owner and key leaders, providing insights about the business and general advice about improving operational efficiency and profitability. AI advice could run the gamut from HR issues to marketing to competitive differentiation and customer insights. This might be a tricky thing to bring to market but someone will. One of the more interesting potential secondary angles is that a (trusted) AI business coach might dramatically change and shortcut the software buying process, making recommendations very specific to that business. That would be much better than searching on Google, going to Reddit or using Capterra or G2, whose user experiences are cluttered and not very helpful.

Funny | Disturbing | Sad

• Heavy ChatGPT users are more likely to be lonely.
• Increasingly, people will have relationships with "AI lovers."
• Italian newspaper produces print edition entirely with AI.
• AI-generated memes won out over human-only memes.
• Now you can see which pirated books Meta used to train its AI.
• AI use in hiring is making it harder to find truly qualified people.

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