AI Adoption Happens One Desk at a Time

The sentence “I’m too old for this” has crossed our path many times. It has almost always been wrong.

We recently sat next to a design engineer, a good thirty years with the company, the kind of person you call when nobody else knows the answer. He had a clear opinion about AI: not for him, something for the young ones. His boss had sent him to three training courses. All of them changed nothing.

So there was no fourth training. Instead, one hour together at his own projects. We showed him that he could search twenty years of his own project history in seconds, instead of struggling to remember in which old order he had already solved that one tricky component. After that hour he was faster than any consultant in the room, because he suddenly connected the tool with his experience instead of seeing it as a threat to that experience.

We think about adoption in the wrong direction

The people who do not join in are rarely too old or unwilling. Nobody has ever shown them where the tool helps with their real work. AI gets introduced top-down, by people who do not do the work themselves, and then everyone wonders why exactly the people who do the work stay away. Change does not happen through awareness campaigns. It happens at one desk after another.

What the one hour looks like

No tool tour, no slides. You sit down next to the person and take ONE real, annoying problem from their everyday work, something that costs them time regularly. Then you solve it together with the tool, live, on their own data. The moment it clicks is almost always the same: when the person realises that the AI does not replace their experience but makes it retrievable. From then on you no longer need to convince them; they show the others themselves.

• Start with the sceptic who is respected. When the 30-year veteran adopts, the team follows.
• One real problem beats ten use cases. Pick something that hurts weekly, not a demo scenario.
• Let results advertise. Internal word of mouth outperforms any rollout campaign.

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