Running on Empty, Nice vs. Necessary & What AI Adoption Is Actually Measuring
This week Jenni Field and I covered four stories that kept circling back to the same problem: organizations are measuring and managing things that feel productive but aren't actually connected to the outcomes they're after.
78% of employees start their job motivated. Something in the organization erodes it and clarity of priorities is the number one fix they're asking for
The Predictive Index surveyed more than 1,000 US employees in 2026 and found that 78% started their current role motivated, but only 16% say their work always feels meaningful now. The number one thing employees say would improve their motivation isn't recognition or fewer meetings. It's clearer priorities. Yet only 35% say their priorities are actually clear on a typical workday. Gallup reported the largest drop in clarity of expectations of any engagement factor since 2020 — a nine-point decline.
It's worth flagging that the Predictive Index makes a behavioral assessment tool, and every finding in this report conveniently points toward buying one. The insight that generic engagement strategies miss the people they're designed for is legitimate. The prescription is about as self-serving as it gets. Separate the data from the sales pitch.
Jenni's read was that organizations tell the story once and assume people carry it. Consistent meaning is what keeps people engaged, not occasional meaning. Mine: just give people clear priorities and stop moving them around. That's not a program. It's a leadership choice.
Read:Running on Empty: How Modern Work Created a Motivation Crisis (Predictive Index)
Internal comms has confused getting into the room with doing something useful once you're there.
Simon Cavendish, chair of IABC EMENA, published a pointed piece this week arguing that internal comms has become addicted to alignment — even when alignment is the wrong goal. His line: too many IC teams end up producing beautifully crafted messages for fundamentally bad decisions.
He draws a distinction between diplomacy and deference and says the profession has been conflating the two. Maintaining access to leadership has quietly become more important than actually using that access to push back. His framing lands: being in the room isn't the win. What we do in the room is the win.
Jenni and I both agree. I've been done with "seat at the table" as a phrase for a long time, but the underlying point Simon's making is the right one. Access is a privilege. If you're nodding along and staying nice, you're complicit. Jenni connected it to professional development — if you haven't built the belief in yourself to have challenging conversations, you'll default to safe. And being forgettable is the fastest path to being optional.
Read: Lead, Follow or Choice: The Choice Facing Internal Comms (LinkedIn)
The companies furthest along on AI are quietly walking away from adoption as their primary metric. That doesn't mean adoption means nothing
Charter's Brian Elliott gathered practitioners from Atlassian, Zapier, Udemy, and others for a closed-door forum on AI measurement. The collective view is that early AI ROI measurement got captured by vanity stats. Microsoft's summary: "We used to pay attention to adoption. Now we just pay attention to performance." Zapier's chief people officer: "97% adoption rates mean almost nothing."
I'll push back on that last one. Getting 97% adoption in anything is a real signal. It's easy to walk away from adoption as a metric when you're struggling to hit it. The more honest question is what adoption is pointing toward and whether it's displacing work that actually matters. Research from ActivTrak found that time on email, messaging, and admin tools more than doubled among AI users, while focused, uninterrupted work fell by 9%.
Jenni's framing is right: adoption is a short-term measure, useful early, but it doesn't mean anything if you never defined the business outcome before you started. That's not an AI problem. That's the same problem we've been talking about in channel and digital measurement for years.
Read: Why Four Tech Companies Say Adoption Is the Wrong AI Metric (Charter)
The real AI rollout problem isn't the tools. It's the narrative leaders encode before the rollout even starts.
Rebecca Hinds writes in Inc. that the biggest obstacle to AI transformation is the story leaders build into the culture before anyone's clicked anything. Beliefs don't stay abstract. A leader who tells employees their jobs are at risk turns them into passive recipients. A leader who tells early-career staff they're obsolete sends them chasing certifications instead of building depth.
Rebeca and researcher Bob Sutton surface a harder finding from their AI Transformation 100 report: when leaders deploy AI in ways that strip craft and human touch from work, what's left is described as a hollow shell with little meaning. I think the motivation data from the Predictive Index report and this narrative problem are the same crisis in different language.
Jenni's point is one she's made before, and I disagreed with her the first time she made it. Her argument: AI change programs are the same as any other change program. We're just making them sound worse and more complicated. I still think AI is categorically different in scale. But we agree on this: listing features isn't communication. The outcome you're after is behavior change, and that requires leaders to have a clear, honest story about how this makes people's work better - not just faster.
Read: The Biggest Threat to Your AI Strategy Isn't the Technology (Inc.)
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
The Frequency Podcast
Real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience.
Chuck Gose and Jenni Field skip the buzzwords and get straight to what matters. New episodes every week.
Listen & Subscribe