--- title: How to Pitch AI More Effectively to Workers description: Breaking news and analysis from time.com. Politics, world news, photos, video, tech reviews, health, science, and entertainment news. canonical: https://time.com/partner-content/charter/how-to-pitch-ai-more-effectively-to-workers/ author: Brian Elliott article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-08-06T09:30:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-06T16:43:20.815Z article:section: Charter og:title: How to Pitch AI More Effectively to Workers og:description: Breaking news and analysis from time.com. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. by [Brian Elliott](https://time.com/author/brian-elliott/) Executive-in-residence, Charter Brian Elliott is Charter's executive-in-residence and CEO of Work Forward. Aug 6, 2026 9:30 AM UTC  Art: Charter by [Brian Elliott](https://time.com/author/brian-elliott/) Executive-in-residence, Charter Brian Elliott is Charter's executive-in-residence and CEO of Work Forward. Aug 6, 2026 9:30 AM UTC [Debbie Lovich](https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-lovich-634b681/) thinks most leaders have it all wrong when it comes to their messaging around AI. Telling people “we’re doing AI \[to improve\] productivity” as if that's the only benefit is “dead on arrival,” she said recently. “Who’s going to want to engage with that?” Lovich, a longtime management consultant with BCG and author of the forthcoming [_Make Work Work_](https://promo.porchlightbooks.com/pages/promotions/makeworkworkps), has spent the last two decades focused on the human side of transformation, whether for digital initiatives, hybrid work, or now, generative AI. The focus, according to Lovich, can’t just be about productivity, which implies “use the tool, and you’ll fire me.” Instead, the messages leaders send—and more fundamentally, the goals they set for AI transformation—have to be broader. “\[It\] has to be what’s in it for employees, as well as shareholders and customers. And 90% of organizations are getting it wrong.” Too many leaders, she said in a recent [Charter webinar](https://www.charterworks.com/built-for-people-how-to-design-work-and-workplaces-to-unlock-potential/) and [Forum](https://www.charterworks.com/forum/) session, are focused on the technology changes they’re making, rather than the very messy work of changing how people, teams, and technology work together. A former peer, Lovich recalled, recently posted on LinkedIn about seven things that need to be done to get value from AI spending, and all of them were technical. “Number eight is being employee-centric,” she said. “It's how you talk about it.” The conversations with Lovich—which, in the webinar, also included JLL CHRO [Laura Adams](https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-adams-a565658/) and former Airbnb chief people officer [Iain Roberts](https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertsiain/)—kept coming back to one argument: The companies pulling ahead on AI are thinking about it as a people transformation, not a technology rollout. That means treating work as a product you must actively design, segmenting employees the way you segment customers, and getting honest about who needs to lead the change effort. Sign up for Charter's newsletter to get the handbook for the future of work delivered to your inbox. Email Address You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our [Terms of Service](https://www.charterworks.com/terms-of-service/) and [Privacy Policy](https://www.charterworks.com/privacy-policy/). ## **Work is the product** Lovich advocates for a more balanced approach to how leaders frame change from AI—better work lives for employees, more delight for customers, and more productivity that benefits shareholders. The framing that happy employees [lead to better results](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-12397-006) and [higher stock performance](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304405X11000869) isn’t new. But the AI era is forcing leaders to confront whether they believe it. That means managing work processes more like you’d manage a product—for example, thinking about onboarding as a continual process that runs from an employee’s initial hiring to being a fully capable team member. "If you're not redesigning the work and the organization around the work, I don't know what you're doing," Roberts said in the webinar. Just like software product managers think about their customers, HR leaders "need to describe who's the customer for my work, what their problems are, and how we're going to solve them. That begins to look remarkably like a product-led organization, even if it's in HR, finance, or legal." Companies already know how to obsess over customers, deploy segmentation plans, set up ranked-choice models, and implement design thinking. Almost none of those capabilities gets used with employees, who are the people doing the work. When it does, the payoff is measurable: BCG's research with Columbia University found that employee-centric companies are [seven times more likely to be AI-mature](https://business.columbia.edu/sites/default/files-efs/imce-uploads/251017%20BCGxCBS%20Survey%20Insights%20vPost.pdf). JLL’s Adams offered an example. Recruiters for the commercial real estate and property investment firm co-designed a tool called Hire Buddy, starting with the parts of the job that bogged them down. Scheduling, which used to require three days, now takes 15 minutes, and roles that took 45 days to fill often close in 10\. "We included the recruiting team in designing this end-to-end," Adams said. The recruiters won out, too: as they moved into higher-value work, such as being a strategy partner for hiring managers, their skills became more valuable, and other companies started trying to recruit them, too. ## **Understand employee needs and fears** Lovich thinks segmenting workers the way HR usually does—by job type, age, or tenure—often misses the attitudes that predict AI adoption. When BCG rolled out an AI scheduling tool to its executive assistants, it found two groups. "Launchers" wanted to move into new roles and grabbed every tool that might help them get there. "Lifers" loved the craft and took pride in landing a complicated meeting, avoiding AI tools “with a 10-foot pole." To encourage them to use it, BCG automated the part they hated (checking availability) but left alone the game they loved (landing a complex meeting in the right part of the day). In many roles, automation requires people to document their expertise, writing down what they know for when they’re not in the room. But telling people to do that can be really hard for some people to hear, because it prompts fears of job loss and complicates work’s role in personal identity. "Writing down my expertise,” Lovich said, can feel like “all of a sudden I'm not critical. Where's my self-worth?" Losing mastery and ego cuts against how people are wired, she said. Roberts suggested leaders can help by telling people how important documentation is. At IDEO, where Roberts was previously COO, teaching outranked mastery, he said. The sign that you had truly learned something was that you could hand it off to someone else. **Whose job is it?** The most common failure, Lovich argued, is that leaders think of the complex task of AI and work redesign as something that can be owned by just IT or HR. But it requires deep ownership by the top-most leaders overseeing the teams involved. "People abdicate responsibility for employees' experience to HR," she said, when redesigning work is line leaders’ job. HR itself has to play a key role in work design, and one way to do that is by going first. "We have a unique role in how we operate across the business and what we can deliver, in a way that may be undervalued,” said JLL’s Adams. It’s hard to do it credibly “unless we could do it to ourselves first." But going first only gets HR so far. Only managers close to the work can help a team take on Lovich’s bigger goal, which is reducing toil and increasing joy at work. "Think about how you could reinvent your work...to take away the parts that suck your soul and give you more work that you love.” _Charter Forum events operate under Chatham House Rule. Quotes here are used with permission._ ## **What to do next:** _None of this needs a task force or a new budget line._ **Say what’s in it for employees.** Give them a stake in the transformation, such as reduced toil or new skills, and let that lead your messaging alongside wins for customers and shareholders. **Put employees in the room on day one.** Co-create the work with the people whose work will change rather than designing it for them. As Lovich puts it, "by the time it comes out, it feels like they all did it themselves, not something shoved down on them." **Make expertise legible, then reward the people who do it.** Treat writing things down and teaching others as traits that get rewarded, not a threat to people’s jobs. **Have leaders go first.** Whatever you are asking people to adopt, do it visibly yourself before you ask others to do it. A leader who shows their successes—as well as their own struggles—encourages others to do the same. --- ## Read more from Charter [READ MORE](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/) [Open article: The Ex-Meta AI Exec Trying to Solve the Entry-Level Hiring Crisis](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/the-ex-meta-ai-exec-trying-to-solve-the-entry-level-hiring-crisis/)  ### The Ex-Meta AI Exec Trying to Solve the Entry-Level Hiring Crisis [READ MORE](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/the-ex-meta-ai-exec-trying-to-solve-the-entry-level-hiring-crisis/) [Open article: Why You Shouldn’t Give AI Agents a Name](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/why-you-shouldn-t-give-ai-agents-a-name/)  ### Why You Shouldn’t Give AI Agents a Name [READ MORE](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/why-you-shouldn-t-give-ai-agents-a-name/) [Open article: Why Leaders Should Ignore Predictions About AI](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/why-leaders-should-ignore-predictions-about-ai/)  ### Why Leaders Should Ignore Predictions About AI [READ MORE](https://time.com/partner-content/charter/why-leaders-should-ignore-predictions-about-ai/) --- ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/partner-content/charter/how-to-pitch-ai-more-effectively-to-workers/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/partner-content/charter/how-to-pitch-ai-more-effectively-to-workers/"},"headline":"How to Pitch AI More Effectively to Workers","datePublished":"2026-08-06T09:30:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-06T16:43:20.815Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/partner-content/charter/how-to-pitch-ai-more-effectively-to-workers/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd92278a66c42adc6/6a74b8db017cc17c9cb2b6fd/ai-empoyee-productivity-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Brian Elliott","jobTitle":"Executive-in-residence, Charter","url":"https://time.com/author/brian-elliott/"}],"articleSection":"Charter","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd92278a66c42adc6/6a74b8db017cc17c9cb2b6fd/ai-empoyee-productivity-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"ai-empoyee-productivity-01.jpg","caption":"","creditText":"Art: Charter","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/partner-content/charter/how-to-pitch-ai-more-effectively-to-workers/","name":"How to Pitch AI More Effectively to Workers"}}]}] ```