In 1854, Elisha Otis stood on an elevator platform three stories above a crowd at New York’s Crystal Palace. Then he told his assistant to cut the cable holding the platform up.
The platform dropped. People screamed. Then it stopped dead.
Otis had built a safety brake. If the elevator cable snapped, the elevator caught itself. He looked down at the crowd and famously said, “All safe, gentlemen. All safe.”
Best product demo ever.
And… people still wouldn’t get in the thing.
Why didn’t people trust a safe elevator?
Their whole lives they’d known one rule: hanging platforms fall, and if you’re on one when it does, you die. A stunt didn’t erase that. Neither did the engineering specs.
The tech worked. The humans weren’t ready.
That’s where your team is with AI right now. The tools can do the work. Your people won’t touch them.
No amount of “AI is the future” talk will change that, because the fear underneath is rational:
“If I make this thing work, I make myself replaceable.”
So here’s what the elevator companies did. They stopped selling the machine and started fixing the ride, with three simple moves:
- They piped in music, so riders had something to listen to besides every creak.
- They put in mirrors, so you checked your tie instead of thinking about the cable.
- They put an attendant in every car. A guy in a uniform riding up and down all day, looking bored. Your brain does the math: he’s not worried, so I’m fine.
They made zero engineering changes. People just felt safe enough to step in.
I use the same three moves to get teams using AI. I call it Magic, Mirrors and Men.
Magic: how do you make the first AI experience feel like magic?
The music made the ride feel pleasant. Almost like magic.
Your version is to make your team’s first AI experience wipe out a task they hate, so it also feels like magic.
A 100-person services company I worked with wanted to kick off with a big all-hands AI presentation (bad idea). We skipped it. Instead, we set up a pilot.
Everyone in the pilot group picked one task they hated, and we used AI to take 90% of it off their plate:
- Sales got call prep and CRM updates done automatically.
- Customer success got follow-up emails drafted straight from call transcripts.
- Ops got weekly reports done in minutes instead of hours chasing down data.
Nobody said “AI is powerful.” They said, “Wait. I never have to do that crap again?”
One workflow, one hour back every time you run it. That’s the magic.
Mirrors: why should your team see a coworker, not a robot?
Generic demos make people picture a robot taking their job. So show them a coworker instead.
“Sarah did her weekly reporting in 18 minutes instead of three hours.”
Sarah still owns the report. She just stopped doing the part a machine should do.
We had the company start an AI Wins channel in Slack. Every week someone posted what they cut, how much time it freed up and what they did with the extra hours.
People stopped seeing AI replacing Sarah. They saw Super Sarah, and they wanted to be her.
Men: who should be your AI Champion?
Pick one AI Champion in each department. Don’t pick the most technical person. Pick the human who gets most excited about making work easier. (No, they don’t have to be a man.)
They find the repetitive work, help teammates, answer the dumb questions without judgment and run a short weekly office hours session.
That does more for adoption than any training program. People trust people before they trust technology.
The missing piece most owners get wrong
Do those three things and your team will step into the elevator.
But there’s one more VERY important piece, and it’s the one most owners get wrong. Skip it and your best people will quietly hide every hour AI saves them, and you’ll be stuck wondering why “AI doesn’t work.”
Read the next Field Notes: Never Ask Your Team to Fire Themselves
Onwards, Joe Stolte
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