Introducing Tech Without Overwhelming Your Team

Technology promises efficiency, but for your team, it can often spark fear, resistance, and overwhelm. And with AI dominating the headlines, many employees worry about whether new tools will replace their jobs instead of supporting them.

In this episode, we unpack how to roll out new technology without creating chaos. From running small pilots to being transparent about your roadmap, we share practical ways to help your people embrace change instead of resisting it.

We cover:

• Why resistance often comes from fear, not laziness
• How to reassure your team that tech is there to help, not replace them
• Why transparency is the key to building trust during change
• The importance of small pilots and MVPs for introducing new tools
• Why you should never automate personal customer interactions
• How leadership, not just technology, determines adoption success

Adopting new tools doesn’t have to mean overwhelming your team. With the right approach, you can ease fears, create buy-in, and make technology work for your people, not against them.

Want help creating a clear, practical roadmap for adopting new technology in your business? Apply for our Thrive360 Business Solutions program. We’ll walk with you step by step to implement the right tools, the right way.

“Don’t automate personal interaction. People crave connection, not bots.” – Anna Angelova

Transcript for “How to Avoid Tech Overwhelm When Your Team Resists Change”

The transcript below was automatically generated. Please ignore any errors or inconsistencies in the text.

Anna Angelova   0:05
Welcome to another episode of More Than Just Task Management, your favorite daily podcast where we help you build a thriving business with me, Anna Angelova, business coach and consultant, and my co-host, Joris Minisvan, the fellow business consultant. Hey, Joris, happy Wednesday.

Jores Minasvand   0:24
Hi Anna, happy Wednesday, beautiful Wednesday, most middle of the week. We’re in the middle of our podcast and we have another beautiful, beautiful topic to talk to you about, which actually it’s interesting. It’s not even the pain of the.
Small to medium businesses. I’ve seen this in corporate level.

Anna Angelova   0:50
Oh yeah, this is something that happens with everyone and the topic. Ultimately, the topic today is how to avoid tech overwhelm, especially when your team resists change. And I know we’ve talked about.
A little bit about adoption before. The thing is that a lot of things are happening right now. The AI hype is still ongoing and there’s so many tools popping up and and everyone is talking how it started. The whole thing started from just those LLM’s and chat bots.
Now to those agentic AI and things you can build and a lot of people are impressed by this and pushing it and saying how if you don’t get on board with this right now, that’s it. It’s like the invent of the Internet that this is, this is where we are right now.
And there can be a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety, a lot of very heavy emotions. I know we call these negative emotions as an IPEC graduate and ELI coach.

Jores Minasvand   1:53
E.

Anna Angelova   2:06
I’m not used to labeling things, but I could a lot of negative emotions are go happening like people. People within your team are probably experiencing a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty and overwhelm with everything that’s going on.

Jores Minasvand   2:09
Yeah.

Anna Angelova   2:21
Whether you are doing any kind of tech changes or not, if people are listening to these, people are probably reading these articles that say, oh, these are the next jobs that will be replaced and suddenly like you see your your job in that list and you’re like, oh ****.

Jores Minasvand   2:23
Good.

Anna Angelova   2:38
What’s going on? So how do you like with everything that’s going on with tech in general and again everything that’s going on right now, how do you avoid overwhelm and especially when people resist the change? And the thing is that chances are people resist change.
Like we we are not. Yes, we love novelty in some sense, but from another perspective, the status quo is what we are looking for and change is almost always viewed as dangerous, so.

Jores Minasvand   3:13
I should add work.

Anna Angelova   3:14
Joris. Oh, yeah, especially at work. Yeah, yeah, Joris, I’m opening the floor for you to to start the conversation.

Jores Minasvand   3:21
Sure, absolutely. I I totally agree with with you, especially with with AI, all this fear mongering that AI is going to come in that they promised business owners you can replace 25 people with AI, you can reduce your workforce.
By 85% and people hear this even. I mean, it’s not just the leadership that reads these articles. People read these articles and they’re like, OK, I come in every day, I go to this OEM website, I download this Excel spreadsheet, I massage it for a whole week. On Friday morning, I submit a report.
So you’re telling me that my jobs can be automated and I’m gone? Well, that’s right there. That that’s resistance. So how do you stop? Resistance goes a little bit further, becomes sabotage where these people clam up.
None of the domain knowledge got gets out of them and even if you bring a consultant to to do the work, they will not cooperate with the consultant. I have seen this resistance many, many times and the way to work around it is training, training, training and.
The fact that that you’re telling the your your people on bringing new technology doesn’t mean you’re bringing replacing them. The way to to to present it is new technology comes in, we’re going to automate all the mundane work, then we’re going to train you.
To do better things.
So instead of fiddling around with an Excel for the whole week where the machine can do it, once the report comes out, then we’re going to give you training and give you tools where you can do advanced analytics. You become a data scientist. So don’t do the mundane work. Let the machine do it. You do the analytical work.
Some people are inherently lazy. They don’t want to, like you said, status quo. I want to come in Monday, go home Friday, get paid and go play with my kids. Those people are the ones who truly will be replaced and I’ve seen that happening. The biggest place that I’ve been seeing people being replaced and I’ve seen corporations.
They they create these these presentations where call centers, ticket routing where they can actually automate this thing and we have done it in a few places. We’re doing in in in more where people will be replaced. A team of 25 people will go down to the tube.
And the computer will, the system will do a better job because for a ticket sitting in a in a in an inbox and being neglected for two weeks, the system is is programmed not to neglect anything. You will just go find the rule for that, whatever that e-mail is or ticket is and it will do something with it.
Will go up, the customer satisfaction, internal, external customer satisfaction will go up, people will get replaced. But in order for and but you cannot replace everyone because you cannot load your entire domain knowledge of your business, whether you employ 5 people or 500 people into a system and automate it overnight.
It may take decades. It will take decades. So train your people, educate them, be open to them and say, OK, you’re doing job A, I’m going to automate job A. You don’t have to do that anymore. What are you interested in to do afterwards? Like there’s so many trainings available, even the the.
These hyperscalers, they provide free training for people to learn their tools because they want adoption, they want consumption. So everything is available for people who want to go with the flow. And you’re right, when the Internet came, it disrupted a lot of the industries.
And a lot of people got eliminated. A lot of automation happened. But people who wanted to learn and adapt, they grew. It’s like right now, again, AI bubble. I’m not just talking about AI. This is overall technology. I was in Mexico last year in a factory where management was begging me.
To go there with my team, stay there for two weeks just to train their people in using an automated, not automated like Power BI. It’s a simple reporting tool online instead of Excel and paper.
And because they were resisting, they were saying, well, I’ve been doing this for 15 years. Why? Why can’t I? I don’t want to do this tablet thing or I don’t want to go to my computer for this. Through the education and through the training, you show them that you can do things better, faster and go have more time to.
Do better things, do new things. I mean that’s that’s the only way that I’ve seen not to have this overwhelm and fear and and clamping down on on on people and some of some people actually get up and leave. That’s even worse. Some people are so fearful right now that people have quit their jobs.
Because AI is coming to take it over. I’m like, oh, I just did A blog about it and then I can’t really widely, you know, extend the blog. But if you’re listening to us, go to levicom.com, go to a blog and I just wrote about it and we referenced the we read that MIT article.
About AI and its bubble that burst. But they do this two years from now, five years from now, another technology will come. They’ll repeat the same thing and everybody will fall for the same thing. Some corporate, large corporations will make billions, but the small companies and people suffer and we want to stop that from suffering. You don’t have to suffer. There are ways.
Is to stop the overwhelm, stop the the the negativity and use technology for the for the good of your team. I rambled on again. I I know I do that, but I’ll stop now.
I’ll pass it on to you. More logic, less ramble.

Anna Angelova   9:21
I love listening to everything you share because there’s so much experience into everything and I don’t call it rambling. As you were sharing these things, a few things came to my mind. So one day we talked about leadership and leading a more experienced team.
When it comes to what we’re going through now and what seems to be happening more and more often these days with the advancement of technology, like you said, AI, the hype will die out, something else will come up. It’s important for you as the leader, as the leader of the business.
To step up and show your people that it’s OK, like this is not the end of the world. Remove that fear, remove that negativity and resistance. Because The thing is that chances are.
You might be using ChatGPT a little bit for updating emails and that’s it.
You’re probably not replacing your people with technology yet, and The thing is, again, we’ve mentioned this before.
Business comes first, and when it comes to business, it’s people, processes, technology.
A I and technology is just one of the, it’s just one of the tools, it’s just one of the things and it comes only after people and processes and not just with what’s going on right now and all the emerging tech and all those advanced models and things like this.
But with any technology like one other thing that as you were sharing this, so in addition to you stepping up as the leader and calming your team down like being the calming that center in the calm center in that storm and and reassuring them that.
You are in this together like this technology is new for you as well. You haven’t decided what to do. You are exploring it. And then when you watch some of the videos like we just watched the was it the other day or the Taco Bell reuse where one customer was so frustrated where it kept on asking so they they replay.
Based the the human with uh like the human interaction on the drive through uh and it with with the automated with the boat and and.

Jores Minasvand   11:41
It’s a bot. It’s a bot. Yeah, it’s a chat bot.

Anna Angelova   11:45
And they replaced it and one person try was trying to order it, kept to ask and kept on asking and what drink do you want to eat beans? So. So it was really funny watching it, how frustrated and angry did he he got it. And then another one, another one.

Jores Minasvand   12:01
He ordered 18,000 Coke Pepsis, I guess. I think, yeah.

Anna Angelova   12:05
Yeah, like 18,000 cups or something like this. And now people are using this as a hack to get to a person where they they say, oh I I want 10,000 something and it it spins, spins and it’s like let me connect you with a customer service or something like this.

Jores Minasvand   12:08
Yeah.
Mhm.
Yeah.

Anna Angelova   12:22
And this actually goes back to something we have talked about before, and I want to repeat it again because it’s worth repeating. Do not automate the personal interaction. Do not automate personal interaction.
This is ridiculous. Like people are craving the connection, the one-on-one connection and the personal interaction. Don’t automate it. Don’t replace people when when someone needs to interact with your customers.
Don’t replace it. We all, we’ve all been frustrated by those like for for this press one, for that press 2, for the the, the, the from a menu that goes like 10 levels down and doesn’t connect us and at the end it says well this is information is better on our website.
Is there anything else I can help you with? So anyway, the other thing I wanted to mention, and I know I’ve also been rambling a little bit, but it’s a very interesting topic actually, and a very, very important topic. The other thing actually I wanted to mention is thinking about.
Technology and dealing with technology. One thing is also to not try to do too many times at the same, too many things at the same time. So ultimately if you can make some change and and I know we’ve talked about this before, we’ve mentioned this and.
Joris, I know with some of the clients you work with, you go and do a pilot, you do a small pilot and and a pilot ultimately is testing things like seeing OK what happens. So for small business it might mean that one person in your team signs up for.
For something and explores it, explores this new solution like signs up for let’s say the paid version of ChatGPT and explores using those agentic AI things, right? So you might choose actually the most forward thinking person on your team to do this and then get.
To the.
Team and share the experience, what they’ve learned, how it helped and what it helped with, what the frustrations were. And then as a team you can decide, OK, does it make sense for this thing to be expanded and other people to start using it? Or is it not relevant? So this is the other thing, doing things.
At a pace that allows your team to be comfortable. Yes, you want to push them. Of course you want to push them, right? Like you don’t want to give them like all the time that they want. You want to push them. You want to encourage them. You want to pull them even to to to.
Adopt this new technology, whether it’s AI or something else, but also do it in a way that it doesn’t overwhelm them. And again, as I said, one thing you can do in this area is have an MVP or a pilot or whatever it is, something small, and then once this is done, once people are comfortable.
With this, then move to the next thing, then add more.

Jores Minasvand   15:42
Absolutely. Very well put. I know we need to wrap this thing up. One other thing that I would.
Encourage especially small business, small to medium businesses. In large corporation you may be able to hide things but in in small corporation in small businesses people will find out and and I think when you talk we talked about fear mongering and you know I think the biggest.
Also, fear is the unknown and you cannot. Like I said, people have mortgages to pay, people have families to take care of, people have ambitions. You can’t treat them as as as drones and and say, OK, I will, we’ll run everything until the 11th hour. Then we’re a tap on your shoulder. You have two.
Weeks off off you go. Your access is done today.
The best thing you can do, especially for a small to medium business, is.
Have a road map, have a plan and say this is what technology coming. This is why we’re bringing it. This is what will happen. This is what we foresee happening for for our workforce and then.
To be transparent and then see how they react. We have no instead of what we’re doing is we’re bringing technology to help us expand. Instead of cutting back from five people, we’re going to hire 10 people. Now you guys have the opportunity to grow with us, become managers even.
So bring give them, give them the the type of, I don’t want to say respect, but transparency. I think this is the word. Be transparent where technology is coming, whether you like it or not, be part of it. The train is leaving the train or the elevator is taking off.
If you’re not inside it, you’re going to either going to come up the stairs halfway through, you’re gone, or you’ll never reach us where we are top there. So tell them openly what it is. And when you have a plan, they actually get intrigued because you’re not just haphazardly bringing stuff in, throwing things, see if the spaghetti sticks to the wall.
You have a plan, you have a road map, you have a strategy and they are part of that strategy. I I would highly, highly recommend or especially for small to medium companies to do this.

Anna Angelova   18:07
And I second this and because again, as a small team, you were so much powerful when you’re together, right? OK, as a small team, it’s so much easier to involve everyone and create that sense of ownership. And again, you’ll notice that although.
The topic for today is technology related. A lot of our conversation was about leadership. It’s about leadership and how you lead your team, how you engage them and get their buy in. So they stop resisting change and adopt these new tools because ultimately these are tools.
Again, business is business. Business first. One of the things that we forget to think about when things are changing is what actually is not changing, what remains. And there’s so many things that are not changing. We as people are still the same. We have the same fears, the same irrational behaviors.
And this this hasn’t changed for millennials, so.
Yes, the topic was technology. We talked a lot about how to deal with this and and how to help your team adopt and how to help like remove the overwhelm. And ultimately it all starts with you and it all starts with you being that center.
Comm center in in that storm and I highly recommend I’ll add the link in the description to the post Joris posted on on the AI hype and like 95% of AI projects are failing in in in the big companies.
Which is, which is ridiculous. It’s like, wow. So anyway, this is it for today. I action item I would say.
Go talk with your team, go talk with your team and ensure them that you are in this together. Like for real, you’re in this together and you will figure this out together. All these changes that are happening, all this technology that.
You might already be introducing or you might be thinking about that. You figure it out together, reassure them, be the leader they need to be. And this week, I guess it’s a theme and I know we’re talking about technology, but ultimately.
If you want more support in doing this, actually I I would highly recommend the drive 360 business solutions because this is where we come with you and we walk the walk with you where we help you create a road map. Sure as you were mentioning we help you create a road map that.
Tells your people this is what the future looks like and we are doing it together and then if you want we help you implement it as well. So highly recommend check the drive 360 business solutions and if you do, if you’re interested, I also highly recommend to submit your application as soon as possible.
Because we only work with two clients a month, so this way we can ensure that we deliver the highest value. So book that application so we can put you in our calendar and get going as soon as possible. And yeah, this is it for today. Anything else, Joris?

Jores Minasvand   21:21
No, I mean, yeah, we we covered, I think we’ve there’s some of the stuff that we covered was overlap, but these are necessary to be repeated because it’s a big problem and we need to address it especially at the small to medium business side.
There is no help. They’re being overwhelmed. They’re being fear mongered. If you don’t have AI, you’re out. No, that’s BS and we are here to help you.
Grow with and without technology the right way, sustainably. So contact us. We’re here. Come to our community. There’s a lot of good stuff that we’re posting there you can learn from. A lot of people are are sharing their thoughts, so.
Yeah, I mean it’s it’s a resource that it’s at your fingertips. If you’re really serious about, you know, building your your business and grow rather than binge watching Netflix, come and and join us and.
Yeah, you know, we’re we’re here. We’ll help.

Anna Angelova   22:30
I think this is a perfect way to wrap today’s conversation and tomorrow we are talking about how you can stop trying to do everything yourself. So join us for another kind of topic on I would say productivity a little bit. So this week we had yesterday was productivity and tomorrow is productivity.

Jores Minasvand   22:55
Oh, yes.
Thanks, Anna. Bye.