AI made top performers feel average, so they quietly stopped using it.

Written by Dr. Noah St. John If you’ve ever led an AI rollout, chances are you’ve seen some version of this happen.

The tools show up. Leadership is enthusiastic. There’s training, a lunch-and-learn, maybe even a channel where people can share what’s working.

For a few weeks, it seems like momentum is building. Then it starts to fade. One HR leader putting together an AI readiness program described it in an online forum: “We’ve done the Copilot training, brought in a speaker, set up a learning channel on Teams that ±10 people looked at.” And then came the real issue: “Hand on heart, none of it has really changed how our managers work day to day.” Most leaders would see that as a training issue.

Or a change-management issue. Or the oldest explanation in business: people resist change. I think it’s something else.

And the clue lies in what AI actually does to the people you depend on most. What AI does to your best people In a 2023 experiment led by researchers from Harvard Business School, Wharton, MIT, and Warwick Business School with Boston Consulting Group, 758 BCG consultants worked on realistic consulting tasks, some with AI and some without. The consultants who started off performing the weakest “had the biggest jump in their performance, 43%, when they got to use AI,” one of the researchers wrote.

And the top performers? “The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one.” A separate study of more than 5,000 customer support agents, published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, found the same pattern. The less experienced agents improved in speed and quality.

But “the most experienced and highest-skilled workers see small gains in speed and small declines in quality.” Put those two findings together and think about the best person on your team. The tool everyone is excited about helps the people at the bottom the most. It gives your star a small speed boost, and sometimes it costs them a little quality.

In simple terms: AI is narrowing the gap between your best people and everyone else. And your best people can feel it. I know this from the inside In my book, Power Habits®: The New Science for Making Success Automatic, I wrote that the words I’ve published in my books, articles, and blog posts, along with the words I’ve spoken in keynotes, private workshops, and live seminars over more than 20 years, add up to far more than the 10,000 hours we often hear are needed to achieve mastery.

To get there, I missed parties. I missed time with my family. I missed vacations.

Today, a free chatbot can summarize any one of my 27 books in seconds. That’s the trade your best people are looking at. Years of hard-earned expertise, the thing that once made everyone come to their desk, now available to anyone who can type a question.

In that same book, written in 2019 before most offices had even heard of ChatGPT, I wrote: “In today’s Information Overload Age, ‘knowledge’ is no longer power. The true power today is Implementation: the actual act of getting things done.” I was writing about the internet. It turned out to describe AI rollouts almost perfectly.

Why your star quietly opts out For hundreds of thousands of years, your place in the group determined whether you ate first, whether you were protected, and whether you made it through the winter. Losing status wasn’t just embarrassing. It was dangerous.

That instinct is still alive in all of us. I call it the Caveman. It’s a survival instinct, and it shaped how people respond to change long before AI entered the picture.

Your best person earned their standing by knowing things others didn’t—the shortcuts, the judgment calls, the answer everyone needed. AI just gave a version of that to everyone in the building. The Caveman doesn’t see that as progress.

It sees it as a demotion. So your star doesn’t openly resist the rollout. Fighting it would look bad, and they’re too smart for that.

Instead, they quietly find reasons it doesn’t work for them. “It’s better if I just do it myself.” In that study of more than 5,000 support agents, that was technically true for the most skilled ones. They point out every flaw in the tool.

They become the most reasonable skeptic in the room. The cost isn’t your star. It’s everyone watching them.

Here’s what most leaders miss. When your star goes back to the old way, you lose less from them than you think. The research shows AI affects their numbers the least.

The real loss is in the people watching. Your less experienced people are the ones who stand to gain the most. But they’re also the ones looking to your star for cues.

When the person the whole team respects goes back to the old way, everyone gets the message without a word: the old way is the safe way. So they follow. And the people who had the most to gain from the tool end up using it the least.

That’s how a rollout dies without anyone ever deciding to kill it. If 10 people on one team could save three hours a week with the tool, and they follow your star back to the old way instead, that’s 30 hours a week. Over a 50-week year, that’s 1,500 hours—from one team.

Run the numbers for your own organization. And don’t forget the cost no one budgets for: how long does a star who suddenly feels replaceable keep ignoring the recruiters who call? If you’re the one everyone walks over to Maybe you’re not the leader in this story.

Maybe you’re the star. You built your reputation the hard way, by knowing more, catching what others missed, and being the person in the room with the answer. And now a tool is handing out answers to anyone who asks.

If part of you has been quietly skeptical, that’s not a character flaw. It’s the oldest part of your brain trying to protect your place in the group. But here’s what it can’t see: when everyone has access to the same answers, the person who can actually get the team to use them becomes the most valuable person in the room.

That’s Implementation. And no tool can do that for you. What most leaders get wrong Most leaders react to a stalled rollout with more training.

More demos. More reminders in the Monday meeting. But training answers a knowledge question.

Your best people don’t have a knowledge question. They have a status question: “If everyone can get the answers I used to be valued for, what am I here for?” Until someone answers that for them, no amount of training will move them. Their Caveman won’t allow it.

The answer that works isn’t “you’re still important.” It’s a new role: be the person the team copies. Go first, in front of everyone, and show them it’s safe. That’s where your star’s value lives now, and it’s worth more than what they knew.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Noah St. John is the No.

1 bestselling author of 27 books published by HarperCollins, Hay House, and Simon & Schuster. Known worldwide as The Caveman Conversion King, he has helped clients add more than $3 billion in sales since 1997 through his coaching advice. Take the free Caveman Quiz at NoahStJohn.com