Name: The Psychology Behind Successful AI Rollouts
Uploaded: 2026-06-02
Duration: 14 min 7 s

The technology is rarely what derails an AI initiative. The people are. Dr. Deepika Chopra explores why COOs leading large-scale AI adoption need to understand the psychology of their teams—because resilience, problem solving, and trust aren't soft skills, they're execution variables. She'll share practical frameworks for building the human culture that make transformation actually stick. 

Deepika Chopra, Author, The Power of Real Optimism

The Psychology Behind Successful AI Rollouts

Conferences

So I, I always start every talk regardless if it's at BCG or Google or Amex or at UPenn Health System or with oncology patients with one thing and I wasn't gonna do it here. I don't know why, but I decided right back there why should the people of the Fortune COO summit be denied this one simple thing and so if it's all right with you if I can ask you guys to just close your eyes. And take a collective deep breath together with me, so breathe in for 3. And then exhale for 3 counts. Something that I find interesting is that sometimes that is the only time that even myself or people will take a deep breath throughout the entire day and in the reality of it that's actually not OK you need to be deep breathing more but when I was invited to speak today I actually found myself thinking about something really interesting so we're spending this enormous amount of time talking about artificial intelligence. And not enough time talking about human beings, which we all are. Because every conversation about AI is ultimately a conversation about change, and change is primarily not a technological experience, it's a psychological one. And as a psychologist and a behavioral scientist myself, that's what really truly interests me. Not the technology itself, although it is very exciting and interesting, but what happens inside of people when the world around them changes rapidly. Because whether you're excited about AI or overwhelmed by it or skeptical of it or you are leading an organization through it, there's one thing that I think almost everyone shares right now and it's uncertainty. From a psychological perspective, uncertainty is very fascinating. So something about the brain is that human beings don't actually struggle with the hard things. We struggle with the unknown things. We can handle challenges, we can handle complexity, we can even handle adversity, and many people in this room, all of us have at some point. But what we struggle the most with is not knowing. And when uncertainty increases, the brain does something interesting, not because we are negative, but because the brain is interested in survival. And what it does is it starts to try to predict. And when it doesn't know what comes next, it starts to look for certainty, for control, for answers, and when we just can't find the answers, what the brain does is it starts to fill in the blanks. And unfortunately or fortunately it's just how the brain works, we start filling in the blanks with worst case scenario planning, and all of us have this in common again, it's not because we are negative, it's because our brain is doing what it's supposed to do, which is protect us. And it is designed for survival. Our brains are not designed for happiness or for growth, and that is something that was astounding to me when I learned it. So you can learn all the tools, you can read all the books, you can listen to all the podcasts, you can watch all the talks, but unless you feel a sense of safety, your brain will not hang on to that idea and notion of growth. And in the Power of real optimism, the book that I wrote, I wrote about how the brain is constantly actually searching for potential threats. That tendency has helped humans survive for thousands of years. But in periods like we are in now with rapid change, that sort of search can actually become a liability. So we're actually going to talk a little bit about what resistance is. So uncertainty and the idea of uncertainty activates the same systems in our brains that were designed to keep us safe. And what happens there, it activates that threat mode which is the amygdala. Our thinking narrows, our risk tolerance drops, our creativity goes down, and people become more attached to familiar ways. And what leaders often interpret in this moment as maybe resistance is something completely different sometimes. Uh, it's a very normal human response to uncertainty. It's not a capability problem, it's a psychological one. How many of you guys out there have rolled out a major change initiative in your organization and you believe that the message was crystal clear, but you're only to discover later that different teams interpreted what you had said that exact same message in completely different ways. Has that ever happened? Yeah. Well, when information is incomplete and people, they don't wanna leave blanks, our brain doesn't leave the blanks, they start filling them up like we just talked about and under uncertainty those interpretations often become more fear based, more reactive and more protective. So one of the most important leadership responsibilities during a transformation period is not managing the change. It's actually managing your team's interpretation. One of the central ideas that lies in my work on optimism is the idea that optimism is actually something that is very misunderstood. So whenever I'm speaking to a large audience of people, I always ask them what's the first word that comes to mind when you think of optimism? And oftentimes I, I'll just have people shout it out, and most of the time without surprise it's this resounding like positivity being positive. And you know I think that it's, it's alarming sometimes for people that I, I'm someone that this is what I study. I'm known as the optimism doctor, which by the way I am not the most optimistic person, um, but that's for another, another day, another story. The good thing is that what I teach is that optimism is actually something that's learned it's a psychological skill, it's not a personality trait, so that's good news for me. Um, but I think what people oftentimes are looking for and they believe what optimism is, is this idea of certainty that everything, knowing that everything's gonna work out, but that's not optimism, that's certainty, and certainty is a luxury that I think very few leaders have right now or honestly very few humans have right now. Real optimism is actually something a bit different. Real optimism is the belief that even when things don't work out or we don't know exactly how they will work out or what comes next. We have the capacity to respond. To adapt, to learn, to shift, to figure it out. And that distinction really matters because adaptability is what we're talking about and adaptability is becoming, I believe, one of the most valuable skills of our time. Not just individually but for organizations, so I thought I would leave you guys with 3 practical ideas that you can take back to your teams. The first one is create clarity wherever you can. The brain handles difficult better than it handles ambiguity. So when people don't understand what's going on and something is unclear, they start to create stories and I know we all have done this in our own lives personally, but guess what, it shows up in an organization as well because we are human. And a lot of times the stories that we start creating to fill in those blanks are often worse than the reality. In periods of uncertainty, clarity becomes a form of leadership, not because you have all the answers, but because you're willing to communicate what you do know and what you don't know. And what matters most right now. People can tolerate uncertainty. We can learn that, but what we struggle oftentimes with is confusion and so clarity really matters. The second one is building adaptability again, not certainty. So I think one of the big mistakes I see when I'm working in the trenches with organizations is that. People I think leaders try to try their hardest to eliminate uncertainty altogether but really honestly we can't do that. So instead of asking how do we make people feel certain, I think a better question is how can we help people feel capable. Capable of learning, capable of adjusting, capable of pivoting, capable of responding because confidence doesn't really just come from certainty, it comes from the evidence that we have successfully adapted before and so optimism is so much more about resiliency we have all already every single person in this room has. Already persevered through your hardest days and your organization has persevered through their hardest days and so one of the things we know from a science based perspective is reminding ourselves of what we have persevered through and also historically what people have persevered through, especially in leadership in change in large technology shifts is very important. Adaptability starts with this idea that that we call cognitive flexibility, and that is the ability to generate more than one possible outcome, more than one possible solution, and there's an exercise that is my favorite exercise that I love to lead teams through, and I call it the three futures exercise. And so what it is is it's taking a current challenge that your team is facing and then asking everybody to write down three possible futures. The worst case scenario, which you will note, some people are really good at coming up with those first, and by the way, I'm one of those. And again I wouldn't try to squash the worst case scenario because oftentimes that that might be something we have to prepare for, but the key here is to not just stop there. Also to imagine and start to talk about what's the most likely scenario. So this is looking at the reality of the situation, and sometimes those two things can be the same. And then the third one, the best possible outcome. And so the key really here is, is to ask with all of those scenarios what would we do in each of the cases. And the goal really isn't the best prediction. The goal is the flexibility. And so even if someone believes or your team believes that the worst case scenario is actually the most likely outcome, that's not the point. The point is to try and have cognitive flexibility and come up with 3 different possibilities and hopefully more. And the third thing is not and we talked, I heard, um, one of the speakers a couple sessions ago talk about this too, but the third one is don't underestimate the role of meaning. One thing we often miss in sort of this conversation about AI is that people are sort of not just asking how will this change my work. When I go into teams and I'm I'm talking about this, a lot of times what I'm hearing is people are asking, will I still matter? Will my contribution matter? Where do I create value? And those are not technological questions as you'll see those are deeply human ones, because regardless of how much technology changes, people still want purpose, they still want meaning, they wanna know that their work still matters and that they have value. Those needs don't disappear. If anything, I think they're starting to become more important during this period of change. And maybe that's why I feel actually quite optimistic is not because the uncertainty is going away, it's not, and not because the change is starting to slow down, it's certainly not. I'm optimistic because I've spent my career studying humans and human beings are remarkably good at being adaptable. We learn, we evolve, we recover. We develop skills that we never imagined we'd need and we find meaning in new circumstances and we do it over and over again and so the organizations that thrive the most won't necessarily be the ones that have the most certainty or that are the most fast. They're gonna be the ones that remain curious, flexible, resilient, connected and engaged while things continue to evolve because ultimately this moment is not just testing our technology, it's actually testing our adaptability and adaptability begins with the belief that we can meet what's next we've done it before and that belief is what I call real optimism. Thank you.