A few weeks ago, I built a complete dashboard in about half an hour.

Using our in-house AI. Not even the latest model.

The kind of work that normally takes days of back-and-forth.

I showed it to the team.

A few people were genuinely amazed. But the most common reaction hovered somewhere around:

“Looks too fancy. Developers will never actually build this.”

Some context. I work in finance and technology, and part of my job — literally, my mandate — is to get people using AI more.

Nobody warned me that the hard part wouldn’t be the technology.

The vibe of dismissal

Let me be honest about where I stand.

I love these tools. The best assistant you can ever have — I mean it.

I don’t know the future. But for now? It’s lovely.

Which makes it strange that at work, I sometimes hesitate to mention that something was AI-assisted. There’s a vibe. A quiet dismissal. Nothing anyone would put in writing — just the temperature of the room dropping half a degree.

Then I got talking one-on-one with a colleague, and out came the catalog.

The one about job seekers hiding white-font text — “choose this resume” — to trick the AI screening systems.

The verdict that these tools are really just for rewriting emails and making your PowerPoints pretty.

Every story was funny.

Every story was negative.

Not one was: here’s what I tried.

The mind grabs the negative

That evening I sat to meditate, still mildly irritated.

And I watched my mind replay the day.

Ten reactions to that dashboard. A few genuinely enthusiastic.

So which ones was my mind chewing on during the drive home?

Not those.

You already know this about the mind. Give it ten compliments and one criticism —

and you know exactly which one it keeps.

Psychologists call it negativity bias. The old traditions just called it the nature of the unexamined mind. It is one of the mind’s oldest tricks: the pull toward the negative.

And here’s the part I can’t stop finding fascinating.

It isn’t a flaw in my colleagues. It’s the factory setting — mine included. The same bias that has them collecting cynical AI stories had me collecting their dismissals.

Different objects.

Same machinery.

I was diagnosing their negativity with a mind busy doing its own.

Why people really resist AI at work

Underneath the jokes, I think three quieter things are going on.

Fear. Will this take my job? A mind that senses threat doesn’t evaluate — it defends. Cynicism is a very comfortable defense.

Feeling small. Nobody enjoys feeling dumb in front of a machine. Especially one that keeps getting smarter, however much we’d like to deny it.

Effort. The one nobody talks about.

Working with AI is collaboration. You have to actually think about what you’re asking. Garbage in, garbage out. Proper inputs, or no proper output.

With a human assistant, when the work comes back wrong, you can quietly be upset at the assistant — even when the real problem was your half-baked instructions.

AI takes away that comfort.

If the output is poor, the prompt was yours.

The machine is a mirror.

And the mirror is the uncomfortable part.

You can’t argue a mind into openness

Here’s what years of practice have taught me — and what makes my adoption mandate genuinely hard:

You cannot control the mind with the mind.

You can’t debate anyone out of negativity. Not even yourself. Better slides won’t do it. Statistics won’t do it. The mind doesn’t release its grip because you argued well.

It loosens with breath.

With stillness.

With honestly noticing what it’s doing.

And sometimes — with the mind simply pausing. You know that moment. When the mind stops, and everything feels wonderful.

Even briefly.

That’s also why, in my experience, people with some inner practice take to new things more easily.

Open to the new. Grounded in the old.

What I’m going to try

So: no evangelizing. No lectures about the future.

I’m planning small sessions where I simply work out loud — solving my actual tasks with AI, mistakes included.

Less “let me show you the future.”

More “watch how I did Tuesday’s work.”

And when the cynical stories come — and they will — I’ll try to meet them the way I’d want to meet a thought in meditation.

Notice. Don’t wrestle. Return to the work.

Will it change anyone’s mind? I genuinely don’t know. Minds don’t change on command.

I’ve checked.

Starting with my own.

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Your turn: how is AI landing at your workplace — are you the enthusiast in a skeptical room, or the skeptic watching an enthusiast? Have you caught your own mind collecting the negative? Tell me in the comments — I read every one.