There is a massive gap right now between what people expect and what is actually realistic.
Employees expect extra days off just because a holiday lands on a Saturday. Executives expect AI to magically adopt itself without a rollout plan. Software companies expect you to just hand over your proprietary data because they quietly updated their terms of service.
Everyone wants the reward without doing the actual work. But the foundation of every good business is still trust and execution. When you ignore that, things break fast
Let's get into it.
A Perk is Not an Obligation
If July 4th falls on a Saturday, I do not think companies should feel obligated to give everyone Friday off. You get the holiday. It just happens to land on a weekend this year. If your company gives you Friday off, awesome. Buy your CEO a hot dog.
But somewhere along the way we decided every holiday comes with a bonus round and it just does not. A perk is not an obligation. Stop acting shocked when your employer follows the actual calendar.
Employees sometimes forget that a perk is just a perk. But executives do something even worse. They buy new tech and assume it will just magically adopt itself.
Is Your AI Broken, Or Is Your Rollout?
I was listening to a podcast from TTEC with our customer Henry Schein One. Their AI employee now handles thousands of customer calls every day. Customers get answers faster, and the company just posted the highest customer satisfaction scores in its history.
But that is not what caught my attention. Nate Christiansen barely talked about models, prompts, or LLMs. He said the hardest part was not building the AI. It was getting employees to trust it. Then getting customers to trust it.
That is crazy.
Companies are spending millions on AI and almost nothing on the rollout.
- No communication plan
- No clear ownership
- No explanation of what the AI should own versus what people should own
Six months later the executive team decides the AI did not work. Maybe the AI was not the problem. Maybe the rollout was.
Five years from now, nobody is going to care which model you picked. They are going to remember which companies actually changed the way people worked. Listen here.
Kudos to Nate Christiansen and the Henry Schein One team. This is what real AI adoption looks like.
Nate and his team get it. You have to actively earn the trust of the people using the tool. HubSpot, on the other hand, apparently decided to just take it.
What the Hell is HubSpot Thinking?
Imagine sending your customers an email that basically says:
"Thanks for spending years building your CRM. We might use your data to make our product better for everyone else. You are opted in by default."
Seriously?
- I bought the software
- I imported the contacts
- I cleaned the data
- I enriched the records
- I paid my team to maintain it
And now you are telling me the default is that my database helps improve yours? Somewhere along the way, SaaS companies forgot who the customer is. The most valuable asset inside a CRM is not the software. It is the trust that what is inside belongs to the business paying the bill.
Burn that trust once, and good luck getting it back. If I were sitting in that boardroom, this email never gets sent.
The Reality Check
Software does not fix culture and a terms of service update does not build trust.
The companies that win the next decade will not just be the ones with the best AI models or the most aggressive data capture. They will be the ones that remember how to treat their people and their customers with actual respect.
Do the work. Earn the trust.
