Build the high-trust teams AI adoption requires.
Most AI adoption strategy treats resistance as a training problem or a communication problem. It's neither. It's a defensive distrust problem — an automatic, ego-protective response that gets stronger the more reassurance is layered on top of it.
Your team will demonstrate this exact pattern the first time you ask them to adopt AI.
My research program spans two decades and five studies on how people defend themselves against threats to identity, judgment, and control. Applied to enterprise AI, the pattern is consistent: the more a system is positioned as trustworthy, capable, and autonomous, the more some users quietly disengage.
That's the thesis behind "Your AI Reassurance Is Backfiring" — and the starting point for every engagement.
Andrew E. Wilson, PhD, is a consumer psychologist (York University, Schulich School of Business) and former Associate Professor of Marketing at Suffolk University. His research on defensive distrust, persuasion knowledge, and ego-protective processing has been cited over 1,000 times.
Before academia, he spent fifteen years in enterprise sales at Pitney Bowes, IKON Office Solutions, and Oracle — the vantage point that shapes how he applies psychological research to boardrooms, not just journals.
Psyborgology is where that research meets the enterprise AI adoption problem directly.
Including "We Became the Cyborg" and "Your AI Reassurance Is Backfiring," on psyborgology.substack.com.
Best for: transformation leads, CIOs and CDOs with a stalled or underperforming AI rollout, and heads of AI enablement looking for a second opinion grounded in research rather than vendor incentives.