The hardest part of AI adoption isn’t the tooling, or the cost, or even the legal bits. It’s the same thing it’s always been: people. And it’s hardly surprising that a number of engineers are so reluctant to innovate with the tool they’re constantly told will take their jobs.

In this talk we'll go through our learnings and successes as engineering managers navigating the hopes and fears of our team members in this strange and uncertain new world.

Some areas we’ll cover include:
- How nurturing a safe space that respects boundaries whilst encouraging people to leave their comfort zones turbocharged AI learning and usage.
- How having senior developers as advocates can alleviate fears and skepticism far better than AI-enthusiastic managers ever can.
- How to respond when a team member is steadfastly against using AI at all.

This is a talk for leaders who know engineers do their best work when leadership is driven by understanding, not fear.