It's no surprise that most AI pilots fail. AI users aren’t in the market for a tool to help get work done. They just want the work to be done.
But most enterprise AI is still packaged as something employees have to use before the work gets done. It gives them a copilot or a chatbot and then asks them to figure out where it fits into the task they’re working on. The AI does not own the workflow, the employee still does.
That means that employee adoption becomes the bottleneck to getting a financial outcome out of AI, because value will only be realized if employees embrace it and use it properly, but the issue with this approach is that enterprise AI has a major employee adoption problem.
Most companies hover around 25-30% adoption rates, and getting employees to embrace new technologies at scale (especially for non-coding tasks) is a very difficult problem to solve. If you’ve been doing your job the same way with the same tools for 10+ years, it’s nearly impossible to break that way of working.
We’ve learned that you can’t just give the company another AI tool and expect them to adopt it when they’ve been doing work the same way their entire career. And if you can’t rely on employee adoption, the best solution to driving ROI with this technology is by embedding it as far into the background of the operations of the company as possible.
Companies need less tools
The mistake we see in enterprise AI deployments is companies handing an interface to every employee in the client’s company. Even if it looks like the right move because it gives each analyst a way to control a swarm of agents to automate most of their manual work, adoption rates won’t move up much because the way that the employee does their work becomes habitual after a few years. It’s nearly impossible to break that habit, and they’ll treat the product like another tool.
We realized that in order to get the company to adopt AI, a software interface wasn’t going to move the needle. With enterprise AI, things would have to be different from the enterprise software way of delivering a product.
Enterprise Software vs Enterprise AI
When a company bought a CRM, or just about any other SaaS product, it came with an interface. In that era, the interface was the product.
SaaS interfaces existed because companies needed tools to help their employees get work done. We realized that in an age of abundant intelligence, companies don’t want tools to help get work done – they just want it done. So instead of selling a tool to help get the task done, we just started selling the outcome. And an outcome doesn't necessarily need everyone in the organization to use an interface – it should just happen.