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95% Of AI Pilots Show No Return, And The Reason Is Human
Introduction Most carriers have stopped arguing about whether the model is accurate. So why does an MIT study keep finding that roughly 95% of AI pilots show no return on what was spent on them? Dr. Gleb Tsipursky spent fifteen years as a behavioral scientist in academia before moving into consulting, and his answer is that the failure is emotional rather than technical. He names three emotions that block adoption inside insurance organizations: fear of losing the job, threat to professional identity, and shame about being seen using the tools. The third is the one Josh pushed back on, twice, and Gleb did not give ground. The episode is a companion to the July conversation with Stan Smith at Gradient AI, who argued that an accurate model gets ignored when an underwriter cannot follow its reasoning. Gleb takes it one layer down. Even when the reasoning is legible, the underwriter, the adjuster, and the auditor may still decline to use it, and the fix belongs to executives and middle managers rather than the data science team. Guest Bio Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, a Columbus, Ohio consultancy advising leadership teams on AI adoption and decision making. He holds a PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill, spent seven years as a professor at Ohio State studying behavioral economics and cognitive bias, and has consulted for Fortune 500 companies including Aflac, Wells Fargo, Honda, and Xerox. The New York Times called him the "Office Whisperer." His eighth book, "The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results," comes out from Georgetown University Press in September 2026 with a foreword by Nick Bloom of Stanford, and draws on more than a hundred consulting projects and fifty executive interviews. He recently ran a leadership workshop for Citizens Property Insurance in Florida. Key Topics -The three emotions - Fear of job loss, threat to professional identity, and shame about being seen using AI. None of the three are addressed by a standard technology rollout. -Training your own replacement - Employees resist because they believe adoption speeds their own obsolescence, a fear he ties to displacement among junior staff and recent graduates. -The shame problem - People use AI privately and will not tell colleagues, which preserves individual gains and destroys the team handoffs insurance workflows depend on. Josh pushed back on this twice. -AI alarmists and pragmatic resistors - Two of the eight psychographic profiles in his book, each needing a different fix from a different level of the organization. -The skill of the future is editing - Professional pride has to move from drafting the claims letter to evaluating what the tool drafted, which is also what regulators require. -Why license-plus-training fails - Buying seats and running online education worked for previous technology and does nothing for the emotional blockers under AI. -Middle managers become supervisors of supervisors - Employees become managers of agents, middle managers manage those supervisors, and leadership is left doing strategy. -Start in claims - Of every department he has worked with, claims gets a short-term return fastest, beginning with an initial coverage read an adjuster then decides on. Notable Quotes "It doesn't matter how accurate the model is, if the underwriter doesn't want to use it. And if the claims adjuster doesn't want to use it and if the auditor doesn't want to use it." "The biggest resistance to change is not the hassle. The biggest resistance to change is the emotions." "People are very reluctant to use AI because they feel that they are training their own replacement." "The skill of the future is not the initial generation. It's the editing and evaluating of that product." Resources Guest: Disaster Avoidance Experts: https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/ "The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work": https://press.georgetown.edu/Book/The-Psychology-of-AI-Adoption-at-Work Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-gleb-tsipursky/ Host & Organization: Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/ Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/ Insurtech Leadership Podcast (LinkedIn Showcase): https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show Subscribe & Review If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your favorite platform and leave a review. The Insurtech Leadership Podcast is available on YouTube, Podbean, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
