Getting AI into the way people work
A model in a demo is easy. The hard part is the manager who has to fold it into a job they already have. For nearly two years I helped over a hundred of them do exactly that.
Most organisations meet AI as a product demo. Someone shows a slick tool, everyone nods, and three weeks later nobody is using it, because a demo never touched the actual job anyone has to do. For nearly two years I worked on the other side of that gap: not selling the tool, but getting real managers and executives to fold it into work they already had.
Meeting people inside their own work
Working as an associate consultant alongside a senior colleague, I co-designed and co-delivered executive programmes on applying AI in business. One rule shaped everything: no generic tool tutorials. A finance manager and a public-sector director do not need the same session, and neither needs a tour of a chatbot. So we tailored each programme to the participants' own processes and sector, taking them from the fundamentals of large language models through to hands-on use inside their daily work, on their own problems, in their own language.
The measure of a good session was not whether people were impressed. It was whether someone left able to point at a task on their desk and say, I could use this here.
Adoption is a people problem, not just a technical one
What surprised people was how little of AI adoption comes down to the AI. Alongside the technical content I also co-delivered modules on the Process Communication Model: how managers communicate, delegate and lead teams. A tool only spreads through an organisation if the people in it can talk to each other about changing how they work. Treating the human system and the technical one as a single problem is, in the end, the entire job.
Scale
Across the engagement, the programmes reached over one hundred executives and managers from around ten public- and private-sector organisations across five countries.
Adoption is, in the end, a translation problem. A capable tool changes nothing until it fits a particular person's work, their language, and the pressures they are already under. Getting that right across a whole organisation, and not just for one user on one screen, is the part of the work I find most worth doing.