The JERK Report #7: The Ground Looks Stable. It Isn't.

Forty-eight percent of employees say they feel uncomfortable telling their manager they use AI at work.

Nearly a third act more enthusiastic about AI in front of colleagues than they actually feel.

And 70% of employers still provide no AI training at all.

Read those three numbers together and you see a system with a crack running through it. It is both a cultural and technological crack in your organization.

Position

AI adoption among small businesses has crossed 57%, up from 36% two years ago. The average employee using AI saves about five and a half hours a week. Managers save roughly double that. The tools work. The numbers are real.

That's position. Where things are.

Velocity

The rate of adoption is accelerating — across every size of business, every industry, every role. Two years ago, AI use was concentrated in large firms and technical teams. That's no longer true. The tools have spread to the people who actually run small businesses: the office manager, the sales lead, the person writing proposals at midnight.

That's velocity. How fast things are moving. And who's moving.

Acceleration

Here's where it gets interesting. Adoption is rising. But training isn't rising with it. Only 15% of small businesses have engaged outside help for AI implementation. Seventy percent offer no training. The tools are spreading faster than anyone is learning to use them together.

Two curves. Different slopes. That's acceleration — the gap is widening, not closing.

Jerk

Now. The jerk signal.

Your employees are using AI. They're saving time. Some of them are saving hours. And they're not telling you.

Not because they're hiding something sinister. Because the culture hasn't caught up. Because they're not sure if using AI makes them look smart or lazy. Because nobody said it was okay.

This is the third derivative. The rate of change of the acceleration just shifted. The adoption curve inside your company isn't moving at the speed you think it is. It's moving faster — underground. Without coordination. Without shared learning. Without anyone building on what anyone else figured out.

When Slack surveyed the workforce, they found that nearly half of all employees feel like using AI is something to hide. That's not a technology problem. That's a cultural fracture.

What this means for your business

You have two adoption curves running simultaneously.

The visible one: whatever your team says they're doing with AI in meetings, in project updates, in their reports.

The invisible one: what they're actually doing at 9pm when nobody's watching. The email they drafted with Claude before retyping it in their own voice. The customer response they generated, edited, and sent without mentioning how it was made.  

These two curves are diverging. The invisible one is accelerating. The visible one is barely moving.

That's your jerk signal. The ground looks stable, but it’s shifting underneath you.

The bind  

Here's why this is hard for owners specifically.

You have likely worked hard to build a culture. You probably set the tone for how work gets done. You're the person who either said "go ahead, experiment" or — more likely — said nothing at all about AI, because you were too busy running the business to have a policy.

That silence is now a signal.

Your people interpreted it. Some decided it was permission. Others decided it was prohibition. Most decided it was ambiguous enough to just keep quiet about.

Meanwhile, the leader who built this company by figuring things out is now in a position where the team is figuring things out — separately, silently, without any of the shared learning that makes experimentation actually compound.

The tools are accelerating. Your team's adoption is accelerating. But coordination is at zero.

Your five-minute practice

This week, ask one person on your team this question:

"Are you using any AI tools to get your work done — even just experimenting? I'm curious, not checking up."

The second sentence matters more than the first.

If the answer is yes, ask what they've figured out. Ask what's working. Ask what's weird or broken.

If the answer is no, notice whether you believe them.

Then ask yourself: have I ever explicitly said it was okay to try?

The Jerk Report reads one business signal through four layers of change: position, velocity, acceleration, and jerk. 3 minutes to read. 5 minutes to use. A calmer way to see what's coming.

— Rose Thun, Design Rosetta

If reading the derivatives of your own business niche sounds useful, I do that. Schedule an introductory call https://www.designrosetta.com/landscape-analysis-introductory-conversation