I’m tired of AI

I've spent years trying to help people get ahead with AI. Building tools, showing workflows, explaining why this stuff matters. And I'm tired. Not tired of AI itself. I'm tired of watching people refuse to use what's right in front of them. People are so resistant, so hot-headed towards change, that they won't even look at the tools that could genuinely make their lives easier. They don't care about productivity gains. They'd rather keep the old ways, stick with folders and Excel, and pretend the world isn't moving. And the data backs this up. WalkMe's 2026 State of Digital Adoption report, surveying 3,750 professionals across 14 countries, found that roughly 80% of enterprise workers are either avoiding or actively rejecting AI tools at work. 54% bypassed their company's AI tools in the past 30 days and completed tasks manually. A third have never used AI at all. This isn't a niche problem. It's the norm.

The usefulness trap

Here's what nobody tells you when you're building something useful: usefulness doesn't matter as much as you think. Something like Notion offers a massive productivity boost over spreadsheets and file folders. It's a no-brainer, on paper. But "no-brainer" assumes people are making rational decisions about their tools. They're not. Psychologists call this status quo bias, our deep preference for the current state of affairs even when change would clearly benefit us. It's not laziness. It's something more fundamental. People have sunk costs in their existing systems. They've written SOPs around them. They've trained entire teams on how to use them. Their muscle memory lives in those old workflows. When you show up and say "hey, this new thing is better," you're not just asking them to learn a tool. You're asking them to throw away years of accumulated knowledge and start over. No matter how useful something is, people don't care. That's the hard part. Harvard Business Review explored this paradox in early 2025: 79% of corporate strategists said AI would be critical to their success, but only 20% were actually using it in their daily work. The gap between knowing something is useful and actually adopting it is enormous.

You can't change people

I've learned this the hard way. You cannot change people. What you can change is how you meet them. A tool that was useful in 2023 but got entrenched because teams kept using it until today, that's not a technology problem. That's a human problem. The friction to something new is real, and it compounds over time. Every month someone uses an old system, the switching cost gets higher. More documents created, more processes built, more people trained. Forbes reported in early 2026 that effective AI adoption requires not just better tools, but leadership support, data readiness, organizational culture shifts, and what they call "change management." In other words, it's not about the technology. It's about everything around the technology. And this is a challenge as a founder too. You can build the most useful product in the world, but if people can't be bothered to switch, it doesn't matter.

The interface is the answer

So what do you do? You make the interface so simple that there's nothing to learn. Your interface should think towards what's the simplest possible interaction someone can have, so that it's self-explanatory. No learning curve. No certification. No Reddit posts where people share hidden features like they've discovered some secret Easter egg. Look at the worst offenders. AWS and Azure basically require a course to learn how to use. The dashboards are overwhelming. The terminology is opaque. Everything is hidden behind layers of menus and configuration. These are incredibly powerful platforms that most people will never fully use because the friction is just too high. And honestly, even tools that pride themselves on simplicity can fall into this trap. When basic actions like selecting an entire column require you to hunt through shortcuts or stumble across a Reddit thread, something has gone wrong. The features exist, but they're buried. That's friction disguised as simplicity. Google understood this decades ago. One search bar. One thing to do. Enormous white space. Compare that to Yahoo's homepage, which looked like a Swiss Army knife of features. We know which one won. The hierarchy of user friction goes deeper than most people think. There's interaction friction (too many clicks), cognitive friction (too much thinking), and emotional friction (too much anxiety about making mistakes). The best interfaces eliminate all three.

AI as the friction killer

This is where things get interesting. AI, specifically AI agents embedded in the tools people already use, might be the best answer to the adoption problem. Think about what Notion did with its AI agent. Instead of forcing users to learn how databases work, how to set up views, how to configure properties, you can just tell the agent what you want and it builds it for you. The friction of getting started, of creating new databases and pages and workflows, gets smoothed out entirely. That's the real insight. People don't resist AI itself. As Workera put it in their 2026 analysis, they resist "one more app." Adoption happens when AI is embedded into existing systems and delivered as repeatable workflows with sensible defaults. The real ROI shows up as fewer handoffs and fewer revisions, not flashier outputs. WalkMe's research found that workers lose the equivalent of 51 full workdays per year to technology friction. That's one working day every single week, absorbed by fighting with tools instead of doing actual work. But AI-proficient users save 40 to 60 minutes daily. The gap between those who embrace these tools and those who don't is widening fast.

The founder's dilemma

This is the question I keep coming back to. If you're building a product, how do you solve this? You can't force adoption. 60% of companies now say they plan to let go of workers who refuse AI, and 77% of executives say resisters won't be considered for promotions. But coercion isn't a product strategy. And 29% of employees admit to actively sabotaging their company's AI strategy, a number that jumps to 44% among Gen Z. Force creates backlash. The answer, I think, is that your product has to do the work for people, not make people do more work. The most productive professionals don't use more tools. They use tools that eliminate work. Meeting recording tools kill productivity when they create documentation work without creating action. Having meeting notes doesn't automatically translate to follow-through. The future isn't better tools for managing work. It's tools that do the work so you don't have to manage it. So if you're a founder struggling with adoption, ask yourself: are you building a tool that requires people to change? Or are you building something that changes around them? Because you can't change people. But you can make the change invisible.