From July 20–22, I joined Claire Davids and a room full of ACTO customers, partners, and life sciences leaders in Boston for the 2026 ACTOvation Summit. The theme was “Turning Human Moments into Momentum,” and it held up. The technology was impressive, but every discussion eventually circled back to the people expected to use it.
Adoption Resistance Isn’t New. It’s Just Wearing a New Outfit.
AI platforms can put a rep's entire customer history, messaging, and prep tools at their fingertips. That's real. But as ACTO CEO Parth Khanna noted in his own post-summit reflection, the shift to AI is producing excitement and anxiety in equal measure, and neither guarantees adoption.
I've seen this movie before. It was the iPad. It was the first CRM rollout. It was every new call-reporting format and every contract reform going back decades. The tool changes. The human resistance to changing how you work doesn't. Managers who've internalized that aren't caught off guard by AI adoption, they just apply what they already know.
Managers Are Still the Ones Who Make It Stick
Telling a rep to “use the tool more” doesn't create lasting change. A real coaching conversation starts by identifying what's actually standing in the way. Three questions get at it:
- Value — Does this help me prepare better or have a stronger customer conversation?
- Price — Does using it cost me time I'd rather spend with customers?
- Risk — What happens if I get it wrong, or it damages an HCP interaction?
Once a manager understands which of these is driving the resistance, adoption becomes a coaching objective instead of a compliance demand and the next step gets specific: one feature, one customer, a handful of calls, before expanding from there.
Information Isn’t the Same as Judgment
I sat on a panel, “The Human Foundation: Judgment, Context, and Connection in the Age of AI”, with Sharon Lustig of CMR Institute and JoJo Kalita of ACTO. The question that stuck with me: are we developing people who can tell the difference between getting an answer and understanding it? A rep can have an entire organization's knowledge in their pocket outside an HCP's door. That still doesn't tell them what matters most to that HCP, or what to do next. That's still a manager's job to develop.
Worth the Trip
ACTOvation leaned into hands-on workshops and real customer conversations over a traditional exhibit hall — practical, well-paced, worth being there. Thanks to JoJo Kalita, Katharine McKarnin Memole, and the ACTO team for having us.
The tools will keep changing. What managers need to lead people through that change hasn't.
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