When Dr. Deepika Chopra took the stage at the Fortune COO Summit, she didn’t open with a slide deck or a framework. She asked everyone to close their eyes and breathe.
Chopra—a clinical health psychologist, behavioral scientist, and the woman who has trademarked the title “The Optimism Doctor®”—said she wanted to make a point before saying a single word about artificial intelligence: We are spending an enormous amount of time talking about the technology, and not nearly enough time talking about the humans running it.
“Every conversation about AI is ultimately a conversation about change,” she told the room. “And change is primarily not a technological experience. It’s a psychological one.”
The real resistance problem
One wonders what the COOs in the audience—many of them deep in the middle of large-scale AI adoption—made of this: a relief or a rebuke? Rolling out a major technology initiative and finding that teams resist it, misinterpret it, or quietly stall it is one of the most common frustrations in enterprise leadership right now, and a major discussion point throughout the conference. The standard response is to invest more in change management, clearer communications, better training.
Chopra’s case is that most of those responses are solving the wrong problem.
“What leaders often interpret in this moment as maybe resistance,” she said, “is something completely different sometimes. It’s a very normal human response to uncertainty. It’s not a capability problem. It’s a psychological one.”
The mechanism, she explained, is neurological. When uncertainty increases, the brain’s threat-detection system—the amygdala—activates. Thinking narrows, risk tolerance drops, creativity shrinks, and people grow more attached to familiar ways of doing things. None of that is stubbornness or sabotage, Chopra explained. It is, quite literally, the brain doing what it was designed to do: Protect the body from the unknown.
“Human beings don’t actually struggle with the hard things,” Chopra said. “We struggle with the unknown things.” What bigger unknown is there right now, after all, than AI?
It’s not about the technology
The deeper diagnosis—and the one most likely to unsettle leaders who’ve spent millions on AI change management—is that the uncertainty driving resistance isn’t primarily about job security or workflow disruption. It’s about something more fundamental.
Chopra said when she meets with clients and discusses this, “a lot of times what I’m hearing is people are asking: ‘Will I still matter? Will my contribution matter? Where do I create value?’”
She paused. “Those are not technological questions … those are deeply human ones.”
Redefining optimism
Much of Chopra’s work—including her USA Today bestselling book The Power of Real Optimism, published earlier this year—is built on dismantling the conventional understanding of what optimism actually means.
Chopra said whenever she asks a large audience what word comes to mind when they think of optimism, it’s almost always “positivity,” and she argued that’s a mistake. “I am not the most optimistic person,” she said, explaining her research shows optimism is a “psychological skill,” not a mindset. It’s something you earn, not something you wish for. The problem with positivity is that it requires a degree of certainty—a belief things will work out. And certainty, she told the room bluntly, “is a luxury that I think very few leaders have right now.”
Three things leaders can do now
Chopra left the audience with three concrete takeaways, framed not as motivational advice but as operational imperatives.
The first: Create clarity wherever you can. Not because leaders have all the answers—they don’t—but because communicating what is known, what is unknown, and what matters most right now reduces the brain’s instinct to fill the blanks with worst-case scenarios. “People can tolerate uncertainty,” she said. “What they struggle with is confusion.”
The second: Build adaptability, not certainty. Instead of trying to eliminate uncertainty—an impossible task—the better leadership question is how to help people feel capable of adjusting. Confidence, she argued, doesn’t come from guarantees. It comes from evidence of having successfully adapted before. Her practical tool here is what she calls the “three futures exercise”—asking teams facing a challenge to map out a worst-case scenario, a most-likely scenario, and a best-possible outcome, then discuss what they would do in each. The goal isn’t prediction. It’s cognitive flexibility.
The third: Don’t underestimate meaning. Purpose and contribution don’t become less important during periods of disruption. They become more important. Leaders who treat the human meaning question as secondary to the operational one are, in Chopra’s view, misreading the room.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
