EP 275 "Do I Trust Myself?" Grace Gravestock on the Real Reason AI Adoption Stalls

Episode description Everyone's arguing about whether AI can be trusted. Almost nobody's asking the harder question underneath it. Grace Gravestock has spent more than twenty years leading change management on some of the highest-profile technology projects around - including the team that set the stage for the $67B Dell EMC integration. Her verdict on why AI pilots stall is unsentimental: it's the same reason ERP stalled, and CRM before that. People aren't using the technology the way it was intended. You can have the best tools in the world, and if people don't use them, it doesn't matter. But the conversation turns when Susan brings up the trust deficit - the LinkedIn feeds full of complaints about AI slop, the comment sections litigating whether a video is real. Grace flips the question entirely: the crisis isn't whether we trust the machine. It's whether we still trust our own judgment. Along the way: the Mac Mini that sat unused for months, why the longest-tenured experts are your real bottleneck, why young people are hitting the brakes hardest, and the one change that rescued a technology rollout that had already failed. About Grace Gravestock Grace Gravestock is a change management leader with more than twenty years on large-scale technology projects. She was part of the team that set the stage for the $67B Dell EMC integration, one of the largest tech mergers in history. Her work spans Deloitte, Dell, and Warner Brothers, plus years consulting inside the utility sector. She got her start in the UK on a government services rollout that touched every citizen in the country, at the front edge of the eGov boom. She's now turning that expertise toward AI adoption, and is writing Three Secrets to Making Change Fun and Easy. What we get into (01:31) From a UK-wide government rollout to AI adoption - Grace's twenty-year arc (03:13) Why AI pilots are failing, and why the answer is boringly familiar (04:56) Why training isn't the root - and what has to happen before it (06:02) The surprise: young people are putting the brakes on hardest and fastest (07:10) Secret one - we get to choose. Why agency is the whole ballgame (08:23) Why your longest-tenured experts are the real bottleneck (and why you need them anyway) (10:35) The Mac Mini that sat there for months (11:47) Susan on being a ChatGPT person who barely opened Claude (12:29) "Am I training my own replacement?" - the fear leadership keeps answering wrong (13:22) Choosing to become more human rather than less (14:30) Monday morning heart attacks, and the work people don't want to go back to (16:50) The people who keep their jobs will be the ones who know how to orchestrate (18:48) How leaders should communicate when they don't have all the answers - WIIFM radio (20:06) The single change that rescued a failed rollout: executive bonuses (21:28) Two utilities, same state, wildly different outcomes (23:36) "We are not planning on cutting jobs. We're planning to 10x our results." (25:06) The trust deficit, LinkedIn, and the inauthenticity problem (28:35) The question that reframes everything: do I trust myself? (30:09) What leaders can actually do this week   Quotes "You can have the best technology, and if people don't use it, it really doesn't matter." - Grace Gravestock "The biggest reason people hate change and fear cha