AI adoption is a people problem (again)

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AI adoption is a people problem (again)

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We are doing it all wrong… again.I'm getting serious déjà vu at the moment as I watch organizations attempt to rollout out AI, and to be honest, it is frustrating the shit out of me.Back in 2014, I wrote a book called Digital Adaptation where I talked about the shortcomings in how organizations were approaching digital transformation. This was the time when organizations were finally waking up to the fact that their website wasn't just another brochure and that digital had become essential to all elements of their operation.Digital transformation was never really a technology problem. The technology was the easy part, and most of it was already sitting there waiting to be used. The hard part was that users had changed how they behaved, and organizations were being dragged along behind them, trying to keep up with expectations set by Amazon and Google rather than by anyone in the boardroom. Catching up meant changing culture, processes, and the way people worked, which turns out to be a lot harder than buying a new content management system.AI adoption is the same problem all over again. Yes, there is a shiny new technology involved. But, the thing that will decide whether it works in your organization is people. Not just your users, but your staff too.We appointed a chief electricity officer once, tooIn the book I compared digital teams to the "chief electricity officer" that some companies appointed when electricity first arrived. It made sense for about five minutes, until everyone realized electricity was something every part of the business used and putting one person in charge of it was a bit daft.Today organizations are busy appointing Chief AI Officers and setting up central AI committees. I understand the impulse. It feels responsible, and it gives the board someone to point at when things go wrong. But, AI is going to end up woven into almost every job in the building, and no central team understands the daily work of finance, customer service, and the warehouse well enough to decide how AI should fit into each of them.IT built it, so staff ignored itWe saw what happens when that distance exists with digital. IT designed systems for people they had never met, and when those systems did not work, staff routed around them using their own off-the-books workarounds. The same thing is happening with AI, except the workaround is now a personal ChatGPT account on a phone under the desk.The CEO has had a revelation. Everyone else hasn't.However, not everything is the same. When I wrote the book, it was really aimed at helping digital teams convince management that change was required. Now the direction has flipped. Often it is the CEO who has become the convert, and the rest of the organization is lagging behind.I spoke to the CEO of a cargo airline recently who had binned a reporting project that had been "in production" forever without ever actually being finished. That was because, within days of trying AI, the CEO had working dashboards built with Claude. That is a nice illustration of another point from the book, by the way. Big projects that try to specify everything up front rarely finish, and building, testing, and iterating beats them almost every time.Understandably, that CEO is now evangelical. The problem is that a dashboard for the CEO means nothing to the person processing shipping paperwork. Everyone needs their own revelation about their own role, and you cannot hand somebody a revelation in an all-staff email.Why your staff are right to be nervousThis is where AI differs from digital, and where I see most rollouts fall apart, because your staff are nervous about AI, and understandably so.Is this about replacing me?AI makes every individual employee wonder whether the CEO's enthusiasm is about replacing them. When leadership announces an AI initiative, a lot of staff hear "we are working out how many of you we need." Now, you can reassure them as much as you want, but they have read the same headlines you have.What's in it for me?Then there is the question of what is in it for them. If staff are still going to be sitting at their desks for eight hours but are now expected to produce more, the honest answer is nothing. They take on the learning curve and the risk, and the organization keeps the benefit. I would be reluctant too.Decades of habit don't vanish overnightWe also underestimate what we are asking when we tell people to give up ways of working they have built over decades. That procedural knowledge is a big part of how people see themselves as good at their jobs, so being told a tool can now do it is hardly a neutral message.They are already using it anywayAnd on top of all that, with some people, adoption is already happening without management permission. Plenty of staff are using AI right now to make their lives easier. With these people, the job is less about getting approval and more about catching up with what they already do and making it safe.So what do you actually...

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