Team Buy-In

Three agency AI rollouts I've been close to over the past eighteen months have, in practice, not really worked out. The tools were fine, the strategy was reasonable, and the founder had put real thought into each of them. What failed was adoption.

The pattern was similar each time. The team was briefed on what was changing, trained on the tools, and given a timeline. Adoption looked fine at first. Then gradually, over a few months, people drifted back to how they'd been doing things before, quietly and without much drama, just going back to what felt like theirs.

I've come to think this isn't really a resistance problem. It's an ownership problem. When people are handed someone else's plan for how they should work and asked to implement it, they'll give it a go up to the point where it gets genuinely difficult, and then they'll default to what's comfortable. Whereas when they've been involved in designing the change themselves, they push through the difficult parts because they're invested in it.

A founder I spoke to in Boston recently had been through exactly this loop. The second time around she brought the people most affected by the change into the process at the start, and let them set the goals and design the pilots. Same tools, she said. Completely different outcome.

It's the same principle that makes the growth lab approach work, really. People implement what they own.