Lindsey England 10/1/26 Lindsey England 10/1/26

The 57% Nobody’s Talking About

The hook

Think about the record player. The music you played this morning. Nearly every piece of technology you touched today. All of it, every bit, started as an idea inside a person. People power everything.

Fear in the room

AI is here, and most people have picked a side. One camp is avoidance, hoping it blows over. Another is racing to figure it out before it figures them out. But there’s a third group nobody’s talking about. More than half of the people using AI at work, 57%, are hiding it.[1] And that silence should tell you something.

Look at it from where a business owner sits. The people hiding their AI use already ran your AI experiment for you. They found the tasks it helps with, the ones it doesn’t, and the shortcuts worth keeping, and they did it without being asked. Now look at it from where those employees sit. Companies are telling people to adopt AI, and 60% say they plan to cut the ones who won’t.[2] So why hide it? Because using it openly still feels risky. 53% of AI users worry that using it on important work makes them look replaceable.[5] Only 13% say they’re rewarded for trying to reinvent their work with AI when the results don’t pan out.[4] And only about four in 10 say their workplace has any policy on AI at all.[1] They’ve been told to use it, but nobody has told them how, or that it’s safe to say so. So they keep quiet.

The risk isn’t the people. It’s that you can’t see it. You can’t train, guide, or protect what you can’t see.

The data

Here’s what should stop you. Only about 5% of companies have seen substantial financial gains from AI.[3] But dig into why, and the failures aren’t technical. They’re organizational. When BCG looked at where the value actually comes from, they put about 10% on the algorithms, 20% on the technology, and 70% on people and process.[3] 70%. The tools work. The cultures around them don’t.

So what are the 5% of companies seeing real gains doing differently?

The reframe

It isn’t their tech stack. It’s their culture.

None of this is new. Culture has always been the real differentiator. The question was never about the technology. It was always about the people. Are they trusted to explore, experiment, fail, and try again? Or are they boxed in, handed powerful tools with no permission to use them well?

AI didn’t change that choice. It just raised the stakes.

Trust in practice

What does trust actually look like on a regular Tuesday? I spent years in HR leadership at a company whose culture was built on trust from the very beginning. Because that trust was already there, people made good decisions on behalf of the company and on behalf of each other, without waiting to be told. They took real pride in working there, and that pride turned into ownership. People took on responsibility no job description could have asked for.

When people feel like owners, they do what’s best for the organization. AI doesn’t create that instinct, but it will stretch whatever instinct is already there. Trusted people experiment with it, share what they learn, and flag what breaks. The research points the same direction. In Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index, the most advanced AI users were about twice as likely as everyone else to brainstorm AI uses together (63% vs 32%), to share tips and mistakes openly (61% vs 36%), and to talk through quality standards (54% vs 29%).[4] That isn’t a skills gap. That’s trust, showing up as behavior.

And if the trust was never there, no tool fixes it.

Close

People power everything. They always have. So picture it. Picture your people with the trust and the room to try something, get it wrong, and try again. And don’t picture something huge. It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking to matter.

The people on your front line know exactly which small, tedious tasks eat their day. Give them the trust to fix those, and that’s where real change starts.

The next big idea for your company is already sitting inside someone who works there. The only question is whether you’ve built the culture that lets it out.

Here’s to the 57%. Let’s give them a reason to speak up.

This is the work I do. Helping people and AI move together. Let’s talk.