Around 1812, weavers in England smashed looms. It was loud, visible and desperate. They saw their livelihood and their place in the world under threat.
Nobody smashes machines anymore. We have become more polite. But the feeling underneath has stayed the same: the fear of no longer being needed.
I see that fear in so many AI rollouts: in meetings, in approval loops and in pilot projects that lead to the next pilot project.
I call these “Verunmöglichungsrituale,” small rituals that quietly make things impossible. Their partner is plain inertia, holding on to the way things have always been done. Neither looks like resistance. Both work very well.
Nobody smashes machines anymore. We have become more polite.
Why ‘just try it’ can be frightening
Most companies introduce AI as an invitation. Here are your licenses. Here is a training. Go and experiment.
So someone tries. And they discover that work that used to take them a week is done in half a day.
Leadership calls that efficiency. For the person at the keyboard, it raises a question nobody asks out loud: What is my contribution still worth?
AI reaches deeper than earlier technologies because it goes into knowledge work. Many marketers built their professional identity on expertise, on finding the right words, on analysis. Now a tool produces parts of that in seconds.
The question stays unspoken, but it does its work anyway. It shows up as hesitation. As cynicism. As pointed skepticism every time the machine gets something wrong.
When the only story a company tells about AI is about speed, the fear has nothing to push against. So it grows.
Change touches identity
We use the word change constantly. For many people, a new manager alone is already a big one. It does something to a person. With AI, roles are shifting everywhere at once.
That kind of change touches identity, and identity doesn’t switch over like a software update.
The organizational consultant William Bridges described what has to happen first. Something has to end before something new can begin. And an ending needs attention. It needs to be named, honored, marked and integrated.
Grief research points in the same direction. Healthy grief doesn’t cut the bond to what was lost. It transforms the bond and carries it forward.
In a marketing team, what ends is a particular form of expertise. For many people, that means writing the first draft of a text or an analysis themselves.
What stays is just as concrete: the judgement of what is good, the knowledge of context and the relationship with the customer. These are exactly the abilities you need to decide when an AI result holds up.
One question before your next AI training
Before the next round of AI training, I would ask a team one question:
What did the old way of working give us that we want to take into the new one?
Answering that question is a start. The fear really eases when a company can say where it is going, and what it needs its people for when it gets there.