The Label Changes. The Work Doesn't

I walk into most rooms today as the AI guy. Sometimes the IT guy. In rooms where neither label quite fits, I’m just the one who brought a different set of questions than everyone else expected. I’ve been doing this long enough to know what that position feels like before anyone says a word. There’s a particular quality to the silence when someone like me sits down at a table that wasn’t originally built for the conversation I’m about to start.

I’m not bothered by it. I’ve been the change agent in the room for most of my career, and I learned early that the discomfort in those early moments isn’t about me. It’s about the idea. People don’t put their defenses up because they dislike you. They put their defenses up because they sense that something is about to shift, and they haven’t decided yet whether that shift is a threat or an opportunity.

The Black Belt Was the Same Job

Before I was the AI guy, I was the Lean Six Sigma black belt in manufacturing. Same dynamic, different acronym. I walked into plants and production floors where people had spent years, sometimes decades, developing expertise in exactly how things worked. I was there to look at the same systems they knew cold and ask whether the way things worked was actually the best way things could work. That’s an uncomfortable question when your identity is wrapped up in the answer.

The technical credential mattered less than I expected. What mattered was whether I could sit in that discomfort with the people in the room, take their expertise seriously, and build something from it rather than replacing it with a methodology imported from outside. The black belt was a license to have the conversation. It wasn’t a substitute for earning the right to be heard.

The Label Changes. The Work Doesn’t.

What I’ve learned across these roles is that the resistance in the room is almost never about the thing you’re introducing. It’s about what the thing implies. Lean implied that the current process was inefficient. AI implies that the current skillset may be insufficient. Both implications land as personal, even when they’re not meant that way. Part of the job, every time, is separating the implication from the threat.

The people who do this work well are not the ones who bulldoze the resistance. They’re the ones who understand what’s underneath it. The plant manager who’s been running the same line for fifteen years isn’t defending inefficiency. He’s defending his judgment, his people, and his track record. If you can’t acknowledge what’s worth defending, you won’t get far with what needs to change.

Being Comfortable with the Role

I’ve made peace with the fact that this is the role I occupy. I don’t walk into a room expecting to be welcomed as the bearer of easy news. I walk in expecting that the value of the conversation depends on whether I can hold the position without turning it into a confrontation. That’s a different skill than expertise. Expertise gets you in the room. How you handle the first ten minutes determines whether anyone is still listening by the end.

The AI version of this work is harder in one specific way: the pace of the technology outstrips most organizations’ ability to build an honest picture of what it means for them. The Lean rollout had a defined methodology, a training curriculum, a change management playbook. AI has none of that at the same level of maturity. So the AI guy in the room isn’t just introducing a new approach. He’s often introducing ambiguity into a room full of people whose professional lives are built on managing uncertainty down, not up.

That’s the actual work. Not the technology. Not the use cases. The work is helping a room full of smart, experienced people think clearly about something genuinely unclear, without losing the thread of what they’re actually trying to accomplish. I’ve been doing some version of that my whole career. The tool has changed. The room hasn’t changed much at all.