There’s something quietly remarkable happening inside public libraries right now. Across the United States, librarians – the same professionals who once helped you navigate a card catalogue – are filling rooms with people who have one thing in common: they’re exhausted by AI, and they want out.
“Avoiding AI” workshops, as they’ve come to be known, have generated waiting lists at libraries in cities from Portland to Philadelphia. The sessions cover everything from disabling AI-powered features in everyday apps to finding search tools that don’t feed your queries into a training model. Demand, according to multiple reports, has been described as unprecedented for library programming. People are showing up in droves, and that tells us something important.
Not about AI being bad. About trust being broken.
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The Backlash Is a Signal, Not a Verdict
Here’s the thing business leaders need to understand: the people packing those library rooms aren’t technophobes. Many of them are your customers, your employees, and yes – some of them are your peers. They’re reacting to years of opaque data practices, AI features that appeared without consent, and a general sense that Big Tech has been making decisions for them rather than with them.
The instinct to reject something poorly implemented is rational. What’s not rational – from a business perspective – is letting that same instinct steer your organisation away from AI adoption entirely.
Because the gap between companies that learn to use AI well and those that don’t is widening, fast. McKinsey’s research has consistently shown that early and effective AI adopters outperform their peers on revenue growth and operational efficiency. The question isn’t whether AI belongs in your business. It’s whether you’re going to let someone else’s fumbled rollout make that decision for you.
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What the Library Workshops Are Actually Teaching Us
Read between the lines of what’s driving these workshops, and you find a surprisingly actionable checklist for businesses:
1. Transparency builds trust. The number one complaint driving people to “Avoiding AI” sessions is that they didn’t know AI was involved in a product or decision. When you deploy AI-powered tools internally or customer-facing, tell people. Explain what the tool does, what data it uses, and what it doesn’t do. That clarity is a competitive advantage.
2. Opt-in beats opt-out, always. Many of the backlash horror stories trace back to features that were switched on by default. In your own operations, whether you’re adopting an AI scheduling tool, a smart CRM feature, or an automated customer service layer, give employees and customers genuine choice. Adoption is faster and stickier when it’s voluntary.
3. Not every problem needs an AI solution. One of the most practical things librarians are teaching workshop attendees is how to identify when a simpler tool does the job just as well. That’s wisdom your operations team could use. AI should solve real friction points, not be layered onto processes simply because it’s available.
4. Digital literacy is a business asset. Libraries are doing the work of educating the public because institutions haven’t. If your team doesn’t understand how the AI tools in your stack actually work – even at a high level – you’re operating blind. Internal training, documentation and open Q&A sessions about your AI tools are not luxuries; they’re risk management.
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Turning the Backlash Into a Competitive Edge
The businesses that will come out ahead in this moment aren’t the ones racing to automate everything. They’re the ones who move thoughtfully – who build internal confidence first, communicate clearly with stakeholders, and roll out AI tools in ways that feel human rather than imposed.
Here’s a practical starting point for SMEs and mid-sized organisations:
Run your own internal “Understanding AI” session. You don’t need a consultant. Gather your team, pull up the AI-powered tools already in your workflow, and walk through them together. What do they do? What data do they access? Who decided to enable them? Getting answers to these questions builds the kind of internal literacy that prevents both misuse and unnecessary fear.
Audit before you adopt. Before adding any new AI-powered feature or platform, run a simple checklist: Does this solve a documented problem? Do we understand how it works? Are we comfortable explaining it to our customers? If the answer to any of those is no, slow down.
Create a feedback loop. The people using AI tools on the ground – your customer service reps, your operations staff, your sales team – will spot problems before leadership does. Build a channel (even a simple shared document) where they can flag concerns or questions about AI tools in real time.
Communicate to customers proactively. If AI touches any part of your customer experience, say so. Not buried in a terms update – in plain language, in the right place. “This response was generated with AI assistance, reviewed by our team” is a sentence that builds trust, not erodes it.
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A Word on the Human Side of Transformation
There’s something worth sitting with in the library story. People aren’t going to these workshops because they hate technology. They’re going because they feel unheard, opted-in without consent, and frankly, a bit overwhelmed.
The managers and executives reading this have a version of that same feeling in their organisations right now. Someone on your team is quietly Googling “how to turn off AI in [insert tool].” Someone else is anxious about what the next software update is going to change about how they do their job. These are human responses to rapid, unclear change – and they’re manageable with communication and leadership.
At Elyxia Digital, we work with clients through Elyxia AI to help businesses move through exactly this kind of transition: not just implementing tools, but building the internal understanding that makes adoption stick. The technology is rarely the hard part. The culture shift is.
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The Bottom Line
Libraries filling up with people trying to escape AI is, paradoxically, one of the clearest signals yet that AI is everywhere – and that most organisations haven’t done the work of bringing people along for the ride.
Don’t let your business make the same mistake the Big Tech platforms did. Move deliberately. Communicate honestly. Train your people. And when you adopt AI tools, make sure your team understands why, not just how.
The gap between businesses that handle this well and those that don’t will define the next decade of competitive advantage. The library workshops are a warning shot. The smart move is to take the lesson.
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