And what it means for the people leaders responsible for making it land
I was in the virtual room of the recent Indeed Future of Work conference when Damola Adamolekun, CEO of Red Lobster, said something that most C-suite leaders think but rarely say publicly.
Someone asked him how he thinks about AI in a restaurant environment — an industry not traditionally associated with technology adoption — and how he brings along the employees who see it as a threat rather than an opportunity.
He said this:
I don’t think people are being unreasonable to be afraid of the possibilities of what could occur with AI. That’s not an unreasonable fear.
Then he said something that separated him from nearly every other executive I have heard speak on this topic:
For us, AI is a liberating tool. It takes out the admin part of the job and lets our people spend more time on the floor. Less time in the office. More time with guests.
Not a replacement strategy.
A liberation strategy.
And then he named the thing that makes it work or fail:
You have to get your people comfortable with the reality that they are critical. What they do to interact with guests and make them feel special cannot be replaced by AI.
Here is what most organizations get wrong about AI adoption
They treat it as a communication problem.
Send the memo. Host the town hall. Share the statistics about how AI creates jobs rather than eliminates them.
And then they wonder why the sentiment scores do not move.
Because AI anxiety is not an information deficit.
It is a psychological safety deficit.
When employees do not feel safe enough to say I am afraid of this — when they do not trust that their leadership will be honest about what is actually coming and what it means for their specific role —
they do not engage with the change.
They manage their exposure to it.
They perform compliance while quietly updating their resumes.
And the organization loses the very people whose institutional knowledge and human judgment are the competitive advantage that no algorithm can replicate.
What Damola understood that most leaders do not
He did not try to talk his people out of their fear.
He validated it.
He said: I empathize with that. I don’t think people are being unreasonable.
And then he gave them something specific —
a clear, honest answer about what AI would and would not do to their particular jobs in their particular industry.
Not a generic reassurance.
A specific truth.
That distinction is everything.
Because psychological safety is not built by telling people everything will be fine.
It is built by telling people the truth — including the uncomfortable parts — and trusting them to handle it.
What this means for people leaders right now
If your organization is navigating AI adoption — and every organization is — the question your culture health needs answered is not:
Do our employees understand our AI strategy?
The question is:
Do our employees trust their leaders enough to say what they actually think about it?
Because if the answer is no —
you do not have an AI adoption problem.
You have a psychological safety problem.
And psychological safety is not a training initiative.
It is a leadership behavior infrastructure problem.
It lives in how your managers communicate under pressure. In whether your senior leaders model the vulnerability they ask of their teams. In whether the people closest to the work believe that surfacing a problem will be received as intelligence rather than insubordination.
That infrastructure either exists or it does not.
And the Culture Health Scorecard™ was built to tell you which one is true in your organization — before the gap becomes visible in your attrition data, your Glassdoor scores, or the quiet resistance that shows up in every change initiative that does not land the way the plan said it would.
The one question worth sitting with
Damola Adamolekun is orchestrating a turnaround of one of the most recognized restaurant brands in the world — across 30,000 employees, in an industry where the human interaction is the product.
He understands that you cannot automate your way to a great guest experience.
And he understands that you cannot communicate your way to psychological safety.
You have to build it.
The organizations that will navigate the next five years of AI adoption with their culture intact are not the ones with the best technology strategy.
They are the ones with the leadership behavior infrastructure to hold their people through the uncertainty of getting there.
That is not a technical problem.
That is a culture health problem.
And it is solvable.
Felicia Davis is the founder of Sovereign Leadership Consulting and a licensed practitioner of the Culture Health Scorecard™ — a diagnostic tool for CHROs, CEOs, and VPs navigating culture change at scale.
If your organization is navigating AI adoption and the people piece is where it keeps stalling — the Culture Health Scorecard™ can tell you exactly where your culture infrastructure is holding and where it is not.
Book a Culture Clarity Session to start the conversation.
https://sovereignleadershipconsulting.com/culture-clarity-session/