Your AI Isn’t Failing - Your People Strategy Is | AI Rollout for Women Founders

Speaker A: I does not run itself. AI does not improve itself. The tool is not your employee, it's an instrument. And an instrument without a skilled player, well, it's just noise. If you have rolled out any AI tool in the last year without having a real honest conversation with the people who are going to use it, you may have already lost them. You just don't know yet. So how do your humans and your AI tools work together as a unified team? Three conversations before, during and and actor the systems that set you free. 30% of employees right now in companies across the US, the UK and across Europe are actively sabotaging their company's AI rollout. Not passively ignoring it, not quietly skeptical, actively working against it, feeding wrong data into the tools, refusing to use them, intentionally producing low quality output. So leadership thinks the AI is broken. And. And before you sit back and say, well, that's an employee problem, I, um, need you to hear me say this clearly. That is not an employee problem. That is a you problem. And that is a leadership problem. And of course it's a system problem, a people strategy problem. And if you have rolled out any AI tool in the last year without having a real honest conversation with the people who are going to use it, you may have already lost them. You just don't know yet. Hi, I'm Latonya Roberts. I'm a fractional chief operations officer and hybrid workforce architect. And for over 20 years, I have been inside organizations from Booz Allen Hamilton to Deloitte, across 30 different countries, watching leaders roll out technology and call it transformation, when what they actually did was buy a tool, send a message, and wait for magic. Welcome to systems that set you free, where we tell the truth behind what's really happening, behind your revenue numbers to today. We're talking about the real reason why your AI isn't working, and it is not the AI. So here's what I see with women founders, and I see this constantly. They go into a conference or they listen to a podcast, or they see a reel from someone talking about how this one tool changed their business. And they get excited. Rightfully so. I mean, I get excited too. I love a new tool. However, what they do next is the problem. They go purchase the tool, they set up the account, and then they send their team a message that says something like, hey, we're going to start using this tool for whatever task. Here's the login. That's it. That's the rollout. No conversation about why, no conversation about how it fits in what the team is already doing. No question asked about whether the team even needs the tool or whether they're already sitting on something that does the same thing with the better prompt. And then a few weeks later, the founder is frustrated because nobody's using it the way that she envisioned. So the team has gone quiet around it, and she's left wondering, is this tool bad? Did I waste money? Is my team the problem? She's asking the wrong questions. Because underneath this behavior is a belief that I hear running in the background of almost every conversation I have with the founders in this space. The belief sounds like this. I need to keep my team lean. And lean means me or maybe another person, and the AI handles the rest. Now, I hear you. I understand the appeal of all of that. I really do. But here's what the belief is missing. AI does not run itself. AI does not improve itself. Not in your business context. Not without a human who understands your business sitting inside the process. Catching with the tool is actually getting wrong and refining it over time. The tool is not your employee. It's an instrument. And an instrument without a skilled player, well, it's just noise. So you know what nobody is saying in the webinars and the reels and the podcast episodes about AI. Before you put anything into an AI tool, you need to have something to put in. You need a documented process. You need a human being who actually does the work to tell you what the process really looks like. Not what it looks like on paper, but what they actually do every single Tuesday afternoon when they sit down to complete the deliverable. Because I promise you, there is a gap between your SOP and what your team actually does. And. And if you're building your AI on the SOP without consulting the team, you're going to get a tool that produces a half correct output every single time. So I'm going to tell you about one of my clients. She runs a consulting firm. She's got five people on the team, great business, they do really great work. Their clients are satisfied. She came to me and said, latonya, I need you to set up some GPT so my team can analyze data and generate client reports faster. We're spending too much time on this. Sound familiar? So I go to work, I reviewed her SOPS. I built the GPTs based on the documented process, and we rolled it out and the reports came back. They were wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough that her team was spending more time fixing them than they were saving. By using the tool in the first place. The team had been doing extra steps in their Analysis that were never in the sop. You know, those critical steps that actually make the difference between a service level report and the kind of insight site that her clients were actually paying for. But nobody asked them. Nobody had sat down and said, walk me through exactly what you do, not what the SOP says. What do you actually do? So the GPT was built on incomplete information and it produced incomplete output. Garbage in, garbage out. Not that it was garbage, but you get the point. So here's what we did. We pulled the team in, we had a 15 minute conversation, updated the SOP, refined the GPT, and then we retested after that. Reviewing the final report took 15 minutes, minor tweaks, but it was client ready. The team saved two hours per report, per client, every single time, two hours recovered. Not because the tool changed, because we brought the people into the conversation before we asked the tool to do the work. So what does it actually look like to bring your team into an AI rollout the right way? This is what I call hybrid workforce integration. And it is one of the five operational layers I assess in every client engagement. It is the layer that answers one question. How do your humans and your AI tools work together as a unified team? Not the humans on one side and the AI on the other, but together with clear roles, clear handoffs, and a real conversation happening at every stage. So here's how I want you to think about it. Three conversations, before, during, and after. Before the rollout. The discovery conversation. Before you purchase a single tool or set up a single GPT, skill project or gym, whatever you use. Sit down with the people who will actually use it. Not to sell them on it, not to announce it, to ask them. What does this work actually look like right now? What steps do you take that, uh, aren't written anywhere? Where do you get stuck? And what would make this easier? If you could wave a magic wand. That conversation is your foundation. That is where your SOP gets honest, and that is what your AI gets built on. And here's the other question you should be asking before you buy anything. Do we already have a tool that does something similar? Because I cannot tell you how many founders I work with who are paying for three tools that overlap, because nobody ever mapped what they already had during the rollout. The orientation conversation. This is not a training session. This is not a how to walkthrough. This is a conversation where you say, here is why we are doing this, here is what problem it solves, here is how it fits into the work you already do, and here is how we are going to learn from it together. Because the first version is not going to be perfect, and that is expected. The last part matters more than anything else. When your team knows that imperfect output is expected, they will report it. They will help you refine it. When they don't know that, when they think they're supposed to just make it work, they go quiet. And quiet is where sabotage lives. After the rollout, the feedback conversation. Your AI tool is not a set it and forget it solution. AI is constantly being updated. The tools you use today will look different six months from now, even three months from now. And your business is not static either. Your processes evolve, your client expectations evolve, your team evolves. So you need a regular moment, monthly, quarterly, whatever fits your rhythm. Where you ask, what is the tool doing well? Where is it still producing output that needs correction? What has changed in how we do this work that the tool doesn't know yet? That feedback loop is what keeps your investment, producing returns now. Without it, you will be in the same place six months from now, frustrated and wondering why it's not working. I want you to sit with something for a second. You already know that 11pm feeling. You're looking at your subscriptions. You're counting up the tools. You're wondering if your team is actually using them and using them the way that you intended. And somewhere underneath that, there is a quieter question that you're not saying out loud. Am I wasting my money? That question is not paranoia, it's actually data. It's telling you that something in your integration process is broken. Not the tools, but the process. The tool is only as good as the human strategy around it. Your AI rollout is not a technology problem. It's a, uh, people strategy problem. And people strategy. It's fixable, but only once you can see where the gap actually lives. That is exactly what I look at. In the Operational Freedom Diagnostic. We go through five layers of your business together. Your systems, your decisions, your capacity, your leadership, and yes, your hybrid workforce integration. And we identify exactly where your business is leaking time, energy and money, including whether your AI tools are actually doing what you pay them to do, or whether they are sitting half used in the background while your team has quietly found workarounds. The diagnostic is a two hour facilitated session and it produces a full report with a clear picture of where you are and what needs to move first. If you've been watching this video, Nodding if that 11pm Question sounds familiar, the link's in the description. Your team wants to come with you on this. They're not against you. They are waiting to be brought into the conversation. So bring them in. Remember, we are not choosing between impact and freedom. We're building both. I'll see you next time. The systems that set you free.