Your Engineers Are Resisting AI; Here's Why That's Actually Rational

InnovationYour Engineers Are Resisting AI; Here's Why That's Actually RationalByJim Douglas,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 05, 2026, 09:30am EDTJim Douglas is the Chief Executive Officer of Luciq, a leading agentic observability platform built exclusively for mobile. gettyThe problem is not the skepticism or resistance. The problem is what most organizations do with it.​Every CEO I know has issued some version of the same mandate in the last 18 months: "We are an AI-first company now. Adopt it, integrate it, report back on progress."And in almost every engineering organization I talk to, that mandate has run headfirst into the same quiet wall. The developers are skeptical, not despite understanding AI, but often precisely because they do. The most resistant engineers tend to be the most senior: people who have mastered the current abstraction; built hard-won instincts about edge cases; and can articulate exactly why the AI output falls short. From a leadership perspective, this looks like resistance. From where they are sitting, it is a completely rational response to being asked to trust a system still imperfect in measurable ways.The problem is not the skepticism or resistance. The problem is what most organizations do with it.The Appeasement TrapWhen a top-down AI mandate meets bottom-up skepticism, most organizations find a middle path satisfying neither goal. They layer a code completion assistant on top of existing sprint mechanics. They automate an hour-long report. They point to adoption metrics and check a box. What they do not do is rethink the process itself.The distinction matters, especially in mobile engineering, where the maintenance burden is structural, not incidental. Across the mobile teams we work with at Luciq, we consistently see Dabble's engineers were...