Adoption Was the Easy Part

You bought the seats, and you were right to. By the time you did, the argument was mostly over. Someone had shown you a job they'd been dreading, finished, while they were still explaining what it was. You got the logins, told everyone to use them, and before long one or two people turned out to be genuinely good at it, and quietly became the people you ask.

That part is done. It was the easy part.

The handover test

Imagine walking a new starter through how the work gets done here. Most of it goes fine. Then you reach the part where AI is involved, and you hear yourself say: ask whoever's best with it, they'll show you.

That sentence carries a lot, and none of it is that person's fault. They've built a good way of working, better than what you had before. But it isn't written down, it isn't built into anything, and the only route to it is their goodwill and their being at their desk. When they're away, the work goes back to how it was done before.

That's the distance between adopting a tool and owning a process. You own the part of the work that still happens the same way when your best person isn't in the building. Everything else you're renting from a colleague.

You can check this yourself:

• Can anyone else find it? Think of the most useful thing AI produced for your business this month. Can someone other than the person who made it find it today, without asking them?
• Does use accumulate? When two people needed the same kind of thing this month, the same sort of reply or summary, did the second start from what the first had worked out? Or did they start from scratch and solve it again, privately?

The question isn't how much your team uses AI. It's whether any of that use adds up.

Why it stalls here

The tools aren't the limit. Today's assistants have shared projects, memory, file access and connectors. Progress usually stalls because of how the work is set up around them:

• the work happens in personal sessions that nobody else can see
• files are uploaded ad hoc, one conversation at a time
• the clever instructions live in one person's head
• there's no shared project, no versioned files and no persistent record of what was decided

A tool that can't reach the actual order, the actual calendar or the note a customer sent is answering from whatever it was handed, however well it does so. Getting it the real information is work. Deciding what to do with the answer is work. Neither arrives with the licence.

What changes things for everyone is the set-up around the tool:

• Can it reach the live enquiries, rather than whatever gets pasted in?
• Does anything happen without someone deciding to start it?
• Does the result land where the next person will look, rather than where the last person left it?
• Is there one deliberate place where a person makes the call, chosen because it matters?

None of that is the model. All of it is the difference between a clever tool and work you own. These things were always being paid for, mostly by somebody's attention. Buying seats doesn't settle any of them on its own.

The fix that isn't one

The tempting next move is to hand the whole thing to someone who does this for a living.

It's restful, and plenty of people will offer. But right now you depend on one person who's good with it and sits nearby. Hand it all outside and you depend on one supplier who's good with it, sits somewhere else and sends an invoice. You haven't removed the dependency. You've moved it somewhere you can't see it.

A black box is any arrangement where the thing works and nobody inside your business could explain how, change it, or tell when it has started going wrong. That's a worse position than today, when at least you can walk over and ask.

It fails quietly. Nothing breaks. The work carries on, a little less suited to you each quarter, because the people who understand how it runs aren't the people who can see it drifting.

The test isn't who builds it. It's who can still run it, change it and fix it after the builders have gone.

The door

If your team has the tools but no shared way of working that it owns, that's a conversation worth having, and it's the one The Catalyst is for.

One real problem: the thing that actually irritates you, not whatever demos best. Built with your people in the room, not shown to them when it's finished. And at the end, the keys. They can run it, change it, break it and put it back together without asking anyone's permission, including ours.

If you'd rather not have that conversation yet, the handover test still works. Go and ask where last month's best answer lives.