The Narrative
Why 80% of employees use AI tools their company didn't approve
WalkMe created the digital adoption platform category more than a decade ago around a simple premise: technology only works when people actually use it. Now the company is applying that same lens to AI adoption inside enterprises, and what it is finding is not what it expected. In a recent episode of The Narrative, we sat down with Melanie Pasch , Global Senior Director, Brand & Corporate Communications at WalkMe, to learn how she rebuilt her communications function from the ground up with AI, what WalkMe's research reveals about how employees actually relate to AI at work, and why incremental improvement is not the same as reinvention. Topics Discussed: What WalkMe's AI at work Pulse surveys found about the psychology of AI adoption inside enterprise organizations The "AI Shame" phenomenon: why employees are simultaneously exaggerating and hiding their AI use, almost 50% on both sides How shadow AI use rose from 78% to 80% of employees in back-to-back annual surveys Why Melanie parted ways with six global agencies after almost five years at WalkMe and what she replaced them with How her manager reframed her entire strategy with one instruction: "I don't want you to make things better with AI, like existing things. I want you to totally do new things" Why she argues that doing comms 25% better is still a losing game How proprietary survey data became WalkMe's most effective earned media lever What the book "Playing Bigger" has to do with reinventing a career in the AI era GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons: Proprietary data outperforms opinion when every inbox is full. Melanie built WalkMe's new comms approach around original survey research, asking questions employees actually want answered but organizations are not asking. The result was the AI at work Pulse surveys, which produced findings newsworthy enough to earn media coverage without relying on brand name alone. One finding - that employees exaggerate and hide AI use in roughly equal measure - became the data behind what Fortune's Nick Lichtenberg later called "AI Shame." Agencies maintain trains; contractors can build new tracks. After almost five years at WalkMe overseeing six global agencies run by a lean two-person in-house team, Melanie concluded the model was consuming time on status calls and maintenance. "I felt that a lot of it was just like status check, keeping the trains on track," she said. "And I didn't want to keep the trains on track. I wanted to like fly above the tracks." Incremental improvement against a broken model is still a broken model. Melanie's manager told her plainly: "I don't want you to make things better with AI, like existing things. I want you to totally do new things." That single reframe shifted her entire approach. Her own conclusion: "doing comms better, even, like 25% better, is still like, playing a losing game. Human judgment becomes more valuable as content volume rises. With AI flooding every channel with undifferentiated content, the ability to decide what not to say and what actually adds to the discourse is becoming scarce. Melanie argues comms as a function is gaining strategic importance, as evidenced by communications roles increasingly reporting to CEOs and high-profile openings at companies like OpenAI. Career reinvention follows the same logic as market category creation. Melanie drew a direct line between WalkMe's decade-long work building the DAP category and her own professional reinvention. Drawing on the framework from "Playing Bigger," she argued: "we all have to be category builders of our careers in this next chapter...and if we don't define it for ourselves, someone else will." // Sponsors: Front Lines - Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service
