How do you get your team on board with AI?
You buy an expensive AI tool, have it built, ship it. And then? Nothing. The messages in the Slack channel go unanswered, nobody picks it up of their own accord, and six months later you cancel the contract. We have seen it happen more than once. Not because the tool was bad. But because the people who were meant to use it were never involved.
Resistance rarely lives where you look for it
Most directors think people are afraid of the technology. That fear is mostly overblown. What people drop off on is when something gets built over their heads. A tool the boss dreamed up, that was never discussed internally, then dropped with the message: this is how we do it from now on. The way of working baked into that tool does not match how someone works day to day. So that person simply carries on as before. Can you blame them? Not at all.
The boss builds, the boss gets frustrated
The pattern is almost always the same. The CEO or a manager has something nice built. Great tool. It ships. And then nobody uses it. The CEO gets frustrated that it is not being picked up, the staff feel that frustration, and the whole thing dies off. The tool was not the problem. The problem was that nobody ever talked to the team about where the pain sits and how they work.
Adoption starts before you build
For us the adoption process begins before a single line of code is written. First we sit down with part of the staff. Not just from the top. The people who do the work every day know exactly where it hurts. Only from that conversation do you decide what needs to be built. That way the tool becomes theirs, not something done to them. And that saves a world of hassle later.
“How daft is it to have something built and then do nothing with it?”
Appoint an AI Lead
Put someone inside the company on the tool. An AI Lead. That person secures enough internal buy-in, acts as the sounding board between you and the team, and keeps it alive once the novelty wears off. We build in phases and check in after every phase, roughly once a month. The AI Lead tests that internally, we adjust, and that way we grow towards delivery together. By the time we ship, with a joint meeting and training, it is no longer a surprise. Everyone watched it take shape.
The sceptic who turns around
Resistance is not the end. It is often the start. We have had developers sit arms folded in a workshop, convinced AI had come to take their craft. Until the penny dropped that AI plays a serving role. That they stay in the lead, and the machine does the boring work while they keep making the calls. That is the moment someone shifts from opponent to ambassador. And one convinced ambassador on the floor does more for your adoption than ten emails from management.
AI takes your boring tasks, not your job
You should not just tell that story, you should let people feel it. Show that the retyping, the manual checking, the copy-and-paste work goes to the machine. And that the time freed up goes back into the work a human is needed for: judgement, contact, taste, making the call. The moment someone notices AI takes over the grunt work rather than their job, the fear disappears on its own. Humans-in-the-loop is not a slogan. It is exactly this: the human keeps control, the machine runs the repetitive part.
Forcing it does not work, growing it does
You cannot impose adoption from the top. An email saying everyone uses the new tool from Monday does nothing. What does work: involving people so early that the solution becomes their idea. They helped think it through, their pain point is solved, they recognise their own way of working in it. Then you do not need to force anyone. Then they want to.
Shall we talk?
We sit on both sides of the conversation ourselves. If we already see at the first meeting that adoption is going to be a problem, we say so right away. Because we find it just as much of a waste as you do when a good tool goes unused. Do you want AI to land with your team, rather than buying yet another licence nobody opens? Book an introduction. First we look at where the pain sits for you, and who we need to talk to before anything gets built.
Marc bouwt dagelijks met AI en helpt bedrijven om ideeen snel om te zetten in werkende tools.
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