Kevin SuraceKevin Surace is an AI pioneer, inventor, author, and human effectiveness authority helping people thrive while AI reshapes work and life.

Why Employees Sabotage AI Rollouts

19 May 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:02

In this brief talk, Kevin Surace reveals that 31% of employees admit to sabotaging AI projects because they fear job loss or change, a behavior that hampers over 80% of AI rollouts. He illustrates the problem with a concrete case from his own company: an AI-driven software QA tool that can detect ten times more bugs in a few hours than humans can in weeks. Despite successful demos, ground‑level staff—often offshore—claim the system doesn’t work and even insert code to deliberately break it, undermining the rollout. The segment highlights the scale of employee resistance, its psychological roots, and the tangible damage it causes to AI adoption initiatives.

Chapters

31% of employees admit anonymously to sabotaging their AI efforts because they felt it was encroaching on their job, or that it could take their job, or they were scared of it, or they didn't want to change. That's impacting more than 80% of AI rollouts. So I'll give you an example. And, you know, in one of my companies, we've had some— in software QA, we make a technology where AI finds all the bugs before You release and it finds 10 times more bugs in about an hour or 2 than humans would find in weeks or months, period, full stop. We have gone in to do POCs and what happens is the C-level exec says, give it to my minions, give it to the people on the ground that may not even be in the United States. They're somewhere, right? These people come back and say, oh, it doesn't work. So, well, we demonstrated it 7 times, works perfectly. And then they say it doesn't work. Okay, well, give us the files. What are you doing? We're looking at it. And humans actually put lines in there to break it.