When Dr. Deepika Chopra took the stage at the Fortune COO Summit, she didn’t open with a slide deck or a framework. She asked everyone to close their eyes and breathe.
Chopra—a clinical health psychologist, behavioral scientist, and the woman who has trademarked the title “The Optimism Doctor®”—said she wanted to make a point before saying a single word about artificial intelligence: We are spending an enormous amount of time talking about the technology, and not nearly enough time talking about the humans running it.
“Every conversation about AI is ultimately a conversation about change,” she told the room. “And change is primarily not a technological experience. It’s a psychological one.”
The real resistance problem
One wonders what the COOs in the audience—many of them deep in the middle of large-scale AI adoption—made of this: a relief or a rebuke? Rolling out a major technology initiative and finding that teams resist it, misinterpret it, or quietly stall it is one of the most common frustrations in enterprise leadership right now, and a major discussion point throughout the conference. The standard response is to invest more in change management, clearer communications, better training.
