The Human Side of AI Adoption

Michael Wakeham is the founder of Brynley Knight, where he helps SME leaders and their teams navigate the human side of AI adoption: putting AI to work without losing morale, confidence or engagement. His premise is simple: most AI rollouts don't fail on the technology, they fail on the people, and that is a solvable problem when you treat it as a human one. Few people are better placed to make that case. Mike spent over twenty years inside SMEs as a director and operational leader, not theory borrowed from corporate but hard-won pattern recognition from doing the actual work. He has founded, built and sold a recruitment business, led the due diligence and acquisition of an SME, designed and implemented ERP systems, restructured finance functions, managed multi-million-pound client portfolios, and grown a regional franchise network from £14m to £16m as the strongest performing region nationally, across recruitment, franchising, corporate healthcare, medico-legal and logistics. An MSc in Psychology shapes how he sees all of it. For two decades the operational problems he met turned out to be human problems wearing a technical disguise, and AI has made that truer than ever. The tools are the easy part. Confidence, trust, resistance and wellbeing are where adoption is won or lost. Through Brynley Knight, Mike delivers training, workshops and advisory that help leaders and teams adopt AI in a way that builds confidence, lowers anxiety and protects engagement, grounded in psychology rather than hype. Mike is also an Advisory Board Member at Arden University, applying organisational psychology to the realities of running SMEs. Direct, commercially grounded, and built for honest conversations about getting AI adoption right, the human way.