Why Your AI Adoption Is Failing — Luma AI's COO On Leading Through The Fear

If there's one industry that captures the resistance so many people have toward AI, it's Hollywood.

You’ll recall AI was a major flashpoint of the historic 2023 labor strikes. And though a growing number of A-listers and directors are encouraging the use of the technology, there’s still plenty of pushback and backlash.

That’s what makes Caroline Ingeborn’s work so important. As the chief operating officer of the $4 billion+ AI video startup Luma AI, she’s learned firsthand what it takes to bring skeptics along.

In recent months, Luma AI has been pushing deeper into Hollywood and advertising, creating new types of production services to help studios conceptualize, shoot, and edit films, and facilitating a $1 million “Dream Brief” competition to fund ideas for commercials using the platform’s technology.

Caroline sat down with Macro Talk in San Francisco on the sidelines of the HumanX conference earlier this year. Our conversation focused on how she's helping legacy industries reimagine work — as well as a tougher underlying question: how do you lead people through change they're afraid of? How do you break through AI resistance?

Here’s her playbook:

❌ Don’t use tactics that feel threatening. For example, telling employees “I’m going to measure how much AI you’re using.”

✅ Instead, role model and promote employees to show-and-tell their own progress.

❌ Don’t treat everyone the same — some people are early adopters, others may not be.

✅ Instead, understand that “this is change … we all handle change differently.”

❌ Don’t position it as “AI is here to make you more productive.”

✅ Instead, ask “What is the most boring part of your job?”

In her own words

I very much enjoyed interviewing Caroline. She was candid, enthusiastic about her role, humble, and funny.

At one point, she offered herself as exhibit A for the way change hits people differently.

“If you ask me almost anything, ‘Caroline, do you want to —’ I say yes before you finish the sentence, because that's who I am,” she said.

“If you take my husband, and you ask the same question — ‘Gustav, do you want to blah?’ He has two answers: ‘no,’ or ‘let me think about it.’”

She also shared her least favorite job: selling American Express cards at the airport at 5 a.m. as a teenager.

“That job sucked because no one wants to buy Amex cards at 5 a.m.!”

Highlights from our conversation are below.

MT: Some observers have noticed that Hollywood is making movies about AI but still publicly bashing it. What’s your read?

CI: There's so many considerations. But if you look at where Hollywood has been, more and more production is moving overseas. We're doing sequel after sequel after sequel after sequel after sequel. It's just a way to minimize risk. [But] most people in Hollywood — that's not why they're there. They don't want to do this either. 

On the other side, there's so many great indie ideas — so many things that are not getting green-lit. The thing that you hear from young indie people is, "Oh, if I could just get this much more money, then I could make my idea."

But then I was talking to one of the biggest filmmakers of our time, and he had exactly the same problem: "Listen, I have this like 12-hour thing I want to make, but no one would fund it, because it's so expensive. Do you think AI can help me?"

And so I do think that a lot of Hollywood is actually looking to AI — on the studio side [to answer] can we get out of the sequel echo chamber? And on the filmmaker side, it's about, can I get my idea green-lit? And then I think there's been this question — what do we do with human performance? 

So we invested early in Hollywood, and we invested early in what we call Modify, which is video-to-video [to] solve a lot of problems with AI. What that means is if you are Ben Affleck, we can then record you, and then using AI, we can move you into any environment.

Someone said this early on to me, in Hollywood: “Hollywood doesn't bend, it breaks.”

Okay — what does that mean?

I think it's like — they say no, and no, and no, and they try to fight it. For the longest time, they just can't. And then now it's, "Oh, now, now we go." They're not there yet. But we're not too far off.

There's emotional blockage for a lot of people. Managers are struggling to lead people through this transition.

So I see a lot of this, just because, based on what we do, creative professionals are our audience. And I have two takes on this. The first thing is, just — this is coming from a very human perspective of how we handle change.

And so then you need to take a step back and ask yourself — how do humans handle change? And my answer to that is, we all handle change differently. 

Some people will be early adopters, some people will have a different route there. And so when I see people trying to affect change inside their own company — I see, "I'm going to measure how much AI you're using." That is threatening people to get across change. I don't know how effective that is, actually. 

What I do see people doing, which is useful — is to try to affect change with role modeling. Or — there's a segment in our equivalent to all-hands of, “hey, anyone who's become 10 times more productive — it can be our office manager, it can be me, can be one of our researchers — show and tell." Let's show-and-tell that story, because that is inspirational. 

Another big question on the people side is, how do you build teams for the future? You don't have this problem, because your company is just AI-native, right? But for other legacy companies thinking about this — they are struggling to figure out how to build the next organization, especially if AI is changing jobs. Do you have any perspectives on that?

I mean — I wouldn't say we're struggling with this, but we are spending a lot of time thinking about it.

Oh, you are as well?

Yeah. Because I think what is happening — especially if you're trying to hire people that are really good at what they do — what now happens to all of them is that they can come to a meeting where there are experts from each guild.

There is a marketing person, a growth person, an engineer, a PM, and this or that. And someone from a different guild had an idea, worked with agents during the night that touched all of these areas of expertise, and comes in and it's like, "Hey, I thought we should do this for growth."

It's so easy to then feel like, "Yeah, but I'm growth. Like, what are you trying to do —"

"Do my job."

Correct. So I think that what becomes then even more important is to have shared goals: "Oh, this just means that you care about my area, and that I can actually now — even though I'm the growth person, I can talk to you, an engineer, and we can solve this." And so I think that mindset shift is very important.

Because then people's egos get hurt.

Yeah. And I mean, I get this too. My job is very fluid — like, for lack of a better word — but even I get this.

You catch yourself.

Yeah. It's partly an experience thing. It's partly an ego thing of like, "Wait, you have no idea how to do this, and now you've written this full thing on how to do this — and half of it is written by agents." But to be able to say, "Okay — that's the ego hat, we're gonna put it over here. We're gonna put on the curiosity hat," and think "Maybe there's gold in here." This is something that you will need to practice.