AI is pretty good, but generative artificial intelligence always makes mistakes.

Saturday night. We went to bed before the end of the first half of the Argentina-Switzerland World Cup quarterfinal match, and my love says, “Hey, the match is already over?”

Thought for a minute and said, “Nope, hon, that’s an AI Overview hallucination.”

Turns out it was. One more AI goof up and easily corrected.

When you run a small business, though, fixing an AI error isn’t so simple. Those mistakes cost dollars.

So if your small business is trying to take advantage of the efficiency and creativity of AI, you need to take these types of challenges into account, especially if you don’t want to make a mistake the magnitude of those made by several companies which tried to shift work from people to AI.

Hard Lessons Learned

Ford Motor Company is one of the latest to rethink some earlier workforce changes. While describing savings from reductions in warranty and recall costs, its vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, Charles Poon, said:

“Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.”

Another example is Commonwealth Bank’s decision to handle the duties of 45 customer service employees with AI. After it ran into quality issues as the number of calls rose, CBA admitted it hadn’t considered all the impacts of its job cuts, and offered people their jobs back as well as other remedies.

While your company or organization likely isn’t a large manufacturer or an international bank, some of the potential pitfalls of missteps are similar.

Because, after all is said and done, people are people.

Monkeywrenching

How would you deal with a team member silently choosing to throw a wrench into hastily formed plans for adopting this rapidly changing technology?

According to an early 2026 study by Writer, this isn’t a hypothetical. Instead, it is something every business owner needs to take into account today:

“Twenty-nine percent of employees admit to sabotaging their company’s AI strategy, with that figure jumping to 44% among Gen Z.”

In companies large enough to have an AI strategy on paper, almost one out of every three of their employees say they are taking steps to ensure an AI strategy doesn’t succeed. Some of the forms it takes include:

• Using AI tools not approved by the company
• Putting proprietary company information into an AI tool
• Reporting worse results than actual on use cases
• Ignoring guidelines or best practices.

Why do they do this?

People have a lot of reasons for not embracing AI, but about one-quarter of study respondents cited a poor company AI strategy as one reason. And their leaders know it, too: 75% of executives said their own AI strategy is “more for show” than real guidance.

Oof.

There is a better way.

Help Is At Hand

If you want to chart a better AI course, here’s a few things you can try:

• Before considering eliminating a role, capture what that person knows that isn’t documented. That is exactly what Ford lost, and it’s why they’re paying experienced engineers to return.
• Ask your team what AI tools they use now and why. Two-thirds of executives think unapproved tools already caused a data leak.
• Pick one process and see if AI can improve it. Measure the use case. Be candid about your success or stumble.

Those are some ways to go about this.

Don’t Go It Alone

Another way is to book an initial, free consultation session with me for Strategic AI Consulting. In the no-commitment call, we’ll discuss where you and your business are with AI, what you want to accomplish, and if I can help you.

Please know I do not have a cookie-cutter set of solutions up my sleeve. Those serve nobody and, as AI continues to change, it means any tip or trick I’d recommend would be quickly out of date.

Also, I know how important it is to involve your team. Communicating with them, bringing them into solution creation, and making them part of a successful AI strategy are how this works well.

If that sounds like how you’re wired too, let’s start working together. The sooner we connect, the better armed you will be to have a real AI strategy; one your employees can get behind and support.