How IT and tech leaders are persuading employees to roll out AI

When Intuit began encouraging employees to use generative AI, CTO Alex Balazs said there were “pockets” of resistance in a place he hadn’t expected: the top ranks of the engineering department.

“Some of our best engineers fought it because they were lifelong coders, and they’re like, ‘I can write better code than this agent can,’” Balazs said. “It’s not a question of if you can write better code, it’s a question of, can it write code faster? And is the faster code that it wrote good enough to solve the problem? The answer is yes.”

Balazs said he had to “continue to interact with them and get them over the hump.” The key, he said, has been setting clear and transparent expectations around AI use, establishing his own credibility as someone who uses these tools, and hearing concerns through “listening posts.”

IT and tech teams are expected to be the vanguard of AI tool rollouts, adopting new tech quickly while bringing the rest of the organization on board. But with some IT jobs at risk of automation themselves, how do leaders make sure that’s a charge these teams are willing to lead?

While the impact of AI on IT jobs thus far is hard to definitively suss out, various IT roles were considered among the most exposed to the technology in a recent index from Tufts University. System administrator roles are already being reshaped by automation in certain ways, experts say.

Meanwhile, more than half of companies (58%) now require at least certain employees to use AI at work, per a recent survey, relying on IT teams to facilitate these new tools.

While many of Intuit’s coders have now come around on agentic coding tools, according to Balazs, the company has switched up its hiring strategy this year to focus more on early-career engineers, an aberration from a broader trend in which AI has threatened entry-level workers.

“At Intuit, we are rethinking what engineering talent looks like in an AI-native world,” Balazs said. “Beginning this fiscal year, a large number of software engineering hires will be early-career engineers—a deliberate bet on agency over accumulated experience.”

For Carter Busse, CIO at integration platform Workato, his AI adoption strategy focuses on identifying and highlighting workers who prove themselves to be AI power users, then replicating and formalizing their processes.

An incentive he wields is a scorecard that tracks the number of AI inputs and AI performance impact across each department with red, yellow, and green grades. The only team currently achieving at least one green mark right now is his own team—business technology. “We are so far ahead,” Busse said. “We are green because we are living in it.”

The goal is not layoffs, but to reduce future staffing needs, Busse said, adding that his team has conducted this AI push so far without much collaboration with HR, which has yet to get on board with AI use.

“They’ve been pretty quiet,” Busse said. “They’re red on my radar. That’s our little scorecard, both operationally and as individuals, not using AI.”

The people ops team is much more involved at data infrastructure company MinIO. They educate people on how to use AI, what is allowed, and boundaries around data, according to co-CEO and co-founder Garima Kapoor. The HR team also uses AI internally.

Like Intuit, MinIO initially faced skepticism from some engineers who thought they could write better code, but they came around. “Once they see AI in action, and how much easier it does make everyone’s life, and they’re productive, it’s more of that mental switch.”

Job van der Voort, CEO and co-founder of contractor management platform Remote, said leaders need to be honest about their intentions with AI and try to legitimately make employees’ jobs easier.

“There’s always some skepticism at the start,” van der Voort said. “People won’t feel threatened if it’s clearly useful. If AI just adds tools or small improvements, they’ll be skeptical. If it removes meaningful chunks of work and saves them time, they’ll use it.”

Unlike at other companies, van der Voort said he isn’t forcing employees to use AI, but more than 70% of the company’s code is now generated with the technology’s assistance because it was ultimately faster than producing manually.

“We don’t incentivize it, but we do expect people to use it where it makes sense,” van der Voort said. “If a tool can save you time or help you produce better work, you should be using it. The goal is impact, not hours worked.”

But a choice in using AI no longer seems to be the norm among the other tech companies we spoke with.

“This is not an option anymore,” Kapoor said, “whether you’re in sales, whether you’re in marketing or finance, it doesn’t matter. You need to use AI in your day-to-day workflow. You have to get into the habit of using it.”

Busse also said AI use was nonnegotiable. “If they’re not going to up-level—and I’m in the Bay Area, I’m in IT, I’m in AI—is this the right fit for them?”