The Journal's Katherine Bindley and Katherine Blunt report a shift in how companies treat AI at work. From startups to Meta and Google, firms are folding AI use into performance reviews and trying to track the productivity it delivers. Encouragement has hardened into enforcement.
Our founder Jeremy Korst is quoted on the tension the mandate skips over: "Do we really think employees are going to broadly adopt this if they believe it's going to cause them to eventually lose their job?" You can require people to open the tool. You can't require them to trust it.
That's the Fear Loop in a memo. The way we see it, adoption is won in the Core: competence, autonomy, and the psychological safety to experiment without feeling replaceable. Mandates that chase usage metrics while leaving the job-security question unanswered tend to produce performative clicks, not the workflow redesign where the value actually lives.
So what: If your AI rollout measures usage but never addresses the fear underneath it, you're enforcing the behavior and starving the outcome. Answer the job-security question first.