• When company leaders introduce AI to their workforces, they often face employee skepticism.
• Colgate-Palmolive and Rent a Mac use employee feedback and data to address AI pushback.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

When leaders at Colgate-Palmolive were ready to roll out an AI Hub for employees this past summer, they knew exactly what they wanted to avoid: a small group of people implementing an AI strategy assuming they knew the best use cases for each department and pushing an AI system onto the rest of the organization.

That kind of approach "puts a bad taste in people's mouths" and can create "a huge amount of friction," said Kli Pappas, the senior director of global predictive analytics and head of AI at Colgate-Palmolive.

Instead of a top-down method, the company created an internal hub through which anyone in the organization could input their natural language with instructions to build a personalized AI assistant and solve inefficient processes in their day-to-day work.

Colgate's strategy avoided one of the biggest barriers companies face when adopting AI: employee pushback, hesitation, or resistance.

Managing how employees experience change "is without a doubt the toughest part" of an AI implementation, much more so than the technology itself, said David Hilborn, a managing partner at the consulting firm West Monroe Partners. Hilborn is also the firm's organization, people, and change practice leader, so he often sees companies fail to devote enough resources to implement changes or lack a clear game plan to manage the people side of an AI initiative.

"That always leads to adoption failures," Hilborn said. "Leaders have to be thinking about the people dimension."

The big unknown: How AI affects me

Employee resistance to AI usually stems from a lack of understanding, Hilborn said. When employees don't grasp how the technology works or how it might change expectations for their roles, they often worry about losing control of responsibilities or even being displaced from their jobs.

Sometimes managers don't fully understand AI themselves, which creates "lumpy leader support" and sows greater uncertainty among teams, said Hilborn.

Without a communication plan, clear expectations on role changes, and the ability to provide feedback, employees face what Tarja Stephens, the founder of the business consultancy AI Opportunity, described as "change fatigue," leaving workers exhausted by tech overhauls.

"They resist, not because they don't want to innovate, but because they really do not have the clarity of how implementing AI will affect their roles," Stephens said.

Rent a Mac, a company that provides access to Apple devices, launched an AI-driven inventory management system in 2023. But Luca Dal Zotto, the cofounder of Rent a Mac, said the company made the mistake of publicizing the AI program prematurely without giving employees enough training or context.

"Anxiety filled the space," Dal Zotto said.

Staff feared losing their jobs, while others questioned the tech's accuracy. Three departments — customer support, procurement, and warehouse operations — resisted AI and only begrudgingly used it. Dal Zotto said that led to a seven-week delay in implementation and cost about $85,000 in expected efficiency savings.

Hilborn has seen instances like this, where an AI implementation doesn't work and leaders have to "go back to the drawing board," he said. "That is very, very, very costly."

Making AI about the people

Upon seeing the resistance, Rent a Mac changed its approach. It identified "AI champions" within the organization — employees trained on AI who could show the tangible benefits of the technology, "reducing their peers' anxiety," Dal Zotto said. For example, warehouse crews found the AI system cut order processing time by 37%.

With its revised AI strategy, Rent a Mac's employee engagement with the automated system rose from 31% to 89% in three months. Now, the program makes about three-fourths of the inventory decisions, freeing employees to manage exceptions and take care of customer service.

Dal Zotto said the biggest lesson he learned was that deploying AI requires investment in technology strategy and people strategy.

AI beyond the IT department

Each company's approach will differ, but Stephens generally recommends a few steps to implement AI in a people-centric way: Keep the narrative around job enhancement not replacement; set clear expectations around how it will affect people's roles; and let employees experiment and offer feedback.

In developing its AI strategy, Colgate-Palmolive looked to its corporate values and code of conduct around workplace culture.

"Everyone should be able to decide for themselves how AI is going to impact their own job and their own tasks," Pappas said.

The company's AI Hub focuses on job-specific use cases — like sorting data or writing copy — rather than technicalities like AI-model types, so employees can build AI assistants that suit their needs. Colgate tells employees to think of it as if they're providing instructions to an intern.

"You don't have to know anything about GenAI," Pappas said.

After launching the hub in July, employees built about 3,000 AI assistants in the second half of 2024. Employees share what they've built so colleagues can see how many people are using the tool and related metrics, such as the number of hours saved, and then decide whether to use it themselves.

Pappas said marketing employees have built AI assistants to help with writing brand copy. A team member wrote thousands of lines of a programming language with an AI assistant, shrinking a year's worth of work into two months.

Manufacturing plant workers have used AI to identify equipment issues and explain the solution in their local language rather than receiving an error code and having to search for solutions in a manual, he said.

"There's lots of small day-to-day things that AI is good at helping people with," Pappas said. "Everyone gets value from it in their own unique way."

• AI is streamlining onboarding processes for companies of various sizes.
• At Hitachi and Texans Credit Union, AI saves time and boosts engagement in the new-hire experience.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

When your organization has nearly 300,000 global employees across the US, Japan, and Europe, many of whom work remotely, how do you manage onboarding new hires?

That scenario presented Hitachi with challenges to keep new employees engaged, but also an opportunity to overhaul its onboarding with an AI digital assistant this past fall.

Hitachi — along with smaller companies like Texans Credit Union — is incorporating AI into onboarding to save time and reduce delays. AI-assisted onboarding is common in tech companies, but it's also important in high-growth firms that are rapidly adding many employees, said Edie Goldberg, the president and founder of the human resources consulting firm E. L. Goldberg & Associates.

On the back end with human resources, artificial intelligence can help arrange paperwork for new hires to sign and trigger notifications to various departments. For employees, AI could take the form of a chatbot available 24/7 to answer new-hire questions in natural language.

"Employees work all over the place in different time zones," Goldberg said. "Something that's going to answer your question when you need it is really helpful."

As HR and tech leaders apply AI to onboarding, the key is to have a clear plan of what problems the technology can solve, metrics for success, and a test-and-learn mentality that spans departments.

Useful AI implementation starts with honest conversations about pain points

Business leaders looking to integrate AI into employee onboarding processes should first identify pain points, Bala Krishnapillai, the vice president and head of the IT group for the Americas at Hitachi, told Business Insider.

While AI applications can certainly improve productivity, the technology is "like a shiny object," Krishnapillai said, adding: "Everyone wants to get into AI." Determining problems can inform research and conversations that lead to selecting or building a way to fulfill a company's specific needs.

At Texans Credit Union, leaders identified a major operational problem: Its logins and system access weren't ready for employees when they started, Jenni Short, the financial institution's chief people officer, said.

"We spent a lot of time making sure that their desk looked nice," Short said. "But, oh, you can't actually log in to the computer."

In September, the firm added robotic process automation to its onboarding, which ensured new hires had access to systems. The process took about six months and started with HR collaborating closely with IT.

"The HR department had five people in it, and no one had the skill set to build or necessarily understand all of the things that we could do," Short said. IT came up with the idea to apply robotic process automation to new hires' logins.

Texans Credit Union's main performance metric for the automation project was the amount of time saved. Before automation, setting up access took 15 to 20 minutes per new hire. Now it takes less than a minute. Managers can also spend less time on administrative work and more time welcoming their hires, and those employees can get acclimated right away.

"Everything is ready for them," Short said, adding that hires could "focus on learning as opposed to trying to figure out how to log in."

Hitachi identified its pain point as process delays. Onboarding employees took 10 to 15 days and involved many manual forms, such as a notice to IT to get the new employee's laptop set up or to facilities to ensure the person had an ID badge and a desk if they worked on-site. New hires' questions weren't answered in real time, which risked the company losing their engagement.

Hitachi uses time reduction as a key performance indicator, Krishnapillai said. The IT department conducted market research and built a private AI system with a custom large language model. Workers fed the model with data from corporate sites, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, and employment books so that it could accurately answer new hires' questions.

IT then worked with HR to beta test the AI onboarding agents with various departments. Once KPIs and service-level agreements were met, teams scaled the AI for onboarding in October after the roughly six-month process.

The results: saving four days in onboarding and reducing HR staff involvement from 20 hours per new hire to 12 hours, said Krishnapillai.

Customizing AI to match companies' needs

What excites many leaders about AI in onboarding is the ability to customize the technology to their unique needs, Goldberg of E. L. Goldberg & Associates said.

"AI has various flavors," Krishnapillai said, adding that companies could look at their technological maturity to determine where and how to start with AI. One "flavor" is generative AI, such as ChatGPT, which is a relatively simple application to adopt. Agentic AI, which acts autonomously and makes decisions, may be more advanced.

Goldberg said many companies start with automating rudimentary processes, like setting up email or assigning equipment. Automated nudges can notify a new hire or HR if a person hasn't signed a document or completed an assigned training.

"All these little tasks are very routine, and they're just perfect for AI," Goldberg told BI.

Texans Credit Union plans to eventually automate more HR functions, such as assigning a desk or parking space, Short said. Right now, these processes require multiple email interactions to be completed.

Ultimately, Goldberg said, any AI application a company deploys needs to meet predetermined metrics and enhance the new employee's onboarding experience.

"It's not just that it's administratively easier for HR," Goldberg said, adding that the hires should see the benefits of autofilling multiple forms or gaining quick access to FAQs: "It's really in service of creating a better experience for that new employee."

• EV owners experience range anxiety despite advancements in mileage numbers and charging speeds.
• Maintaining battery health requires optimal charging levels and managing temperature and speed.
• This article is part of "Getting Ready for Electric," a series of guides and practical advice for buying your next EV.

Electric vehicles have come a long way since their debut about 15 years ago. One of the first EVs, the Nissan Leaf, had just over 120 miles of range. Meanwhile, many of today's EVs boast 400-plus miles on a single charge.

That hasn't stopped EV owners from feeling what's known as "range anxiety." If your gas tank says you have only 50 miles left, there's comfort in knowing you can quickly find a gas station and fuel up in five minutes. With electric, though, "drivers tend to watch the miles-remaining estimate way more than they did in the gas car," John Higham, a board member of the Electric Vehicle Association, said.

So for many consumers who have purchased an electric vehicle, or are ready to take the plunge, range is a big factor. How do you keep your car's range going strong?

You don't need to become an engineer or battery expert to keep your EV in top shape. Following a few simple tips can help you make the most of your car.

As Higham said: "Arming yourself with a few facts will help alleviate some anxiety."

Find the charging sweet spot

Best practices for charging your car depend on which vehicle you have and the composition of its battery.

"When you buy or lease an EV, the dealer or manufacturer" lets you know "the best charging level for the vehicle," said Ingrid Malmgren, a senior policy director at Plug In America, an organization focused on EV education, advocacy, and research.

For many vehicles, keeping the battery charged between 20% and 80% can minimize stress on the battery cells, according to Aatish Patel, the president and cofounder of XCharge North America, a provider of EV charging solutions.

Think of it like charging your phone, said Mark Barrott, a partner in the automotive and mobility practice at the consulting firm Plante Moran. Leaving your phone plugged in for a long time after it's reached 100% can overcharge the battery and could reduce its capacity over time.

On the flip side, other vehicles and batteries function better when charged to 100%, Malmgren said.

She and Higham advised reading the owner's manual and following the manufacturer's recommendations for charging your car.

EV owners don't necessarily need to shy away from fast chargers. In extreme circumstances, like if the battery is under 5% or over 90%, fast charging could stress the battery, Malmgren said. But her organization has seen many EV drivers who used fast chargers for years and didn't see abnormal battery loss.

Car and battery makers have also refined the technology so that batteries can accept charge much faster. At this point, the time to charge your EV is similar to how long it takes to fill your gas tank, Barrott said. That helps with range anxiety, since a low battery doesn't mean you'll be waiting hours before you can get on the road again.

Regulate your car's temperature and speeds

Modern EVs are designed to maintain their own temperatures, but you can help further that. If possible, park in the shade when it's hot or inside a garage if it's cold.

Range can decrease in colder temperatures. It's a best practice not to leave your car with a nearly zero charge in extremely cold weather. Owning an EV in a cold climate isn't a dealbreaker, though.

"Hey, over 95% of car sales in Norway are electric, where it actually gets cold," Higham said. "EVs do work in the cold. You just need to know how they are affected."

You can also regulate your car's speeds, accelerating and braking smoothly when it's safe to do so, which helps prolong the vehicle's range. Aggressive acceleration can wear on the battery over time, Patel said.

Carmakers are betting big on EVs

The technology continues to advance as the auto industry invests in electric vehicles. Carmakers, battery manufacturers, and charging providers continue to look for ways to lengthen range, "working together in concert to design solutions that make sense," Barrott said.

If you're already an EV owner and suspect your car's range may be declining, contact your dealer or manufacturer. Technicians can check out your car, and there may be software updates to make the vehicle more efficient. Battery replacements, which are extremely rare, may be covered under warranty.

But for the most part, unless you spot a big red flag, experts say you don't need to worry about your car's battery health or have anxiety about your EV's range. Stick to the manufacturer's recommendations for charging, and do your best to avoid extreme temperatures or speeds.

"Focusing on proper habits ensures you get the most out of your EV for years to come," Patel said.