July 31, 2024
In the digital world,
it’s all about employee adoption & utilization
Is your organization struggling to get your employees to adopt new digital technologies?
Numerous studies have documented that the vast majority of AI projects over the past several years have failed to achieve their desired outcomes. Much of that failure has been the result of a large percentage of companies who have not been successful in getting their employees to adopt and utilize it.
- A recent McKinsey study documented that:
- Just 11% of companies have adopted GenAI at scale
- Only 15% of companies are seeing GenAI have a meaningful impact on their financial performance
- A Forbes study documented that:
- 75% of companies said they are having difficulty in finding qualified candidates to develop and manage their GenAI program
The reality is that AI is not IT. As such, the skills and knowledge required to successfully acquire or develop and run AI programs do not exist on most IT teams, as well as other internal operating teams like marketing, sales, customer support, and finance. As a result, this lack of understanding and experience with this new disruptive technology has caused many employees to resist adopting and using it.
In Crossing the Chasm, my brother Geoffrey’s initial focus was on helping early-stage companies successfully scale into the mainstream market. The Technology Adoption Lifecycle chart shown above is the foundational framework to successfully navigate across that chasm. What it illustrates is that any time a new disruptive technology like GenAI is introduced, the market self-segments into different categories with very different adoption motivations.
If your employees aren’t adopting and utilizing AI, then it’s unlikely your customers will either.
Here are the three primary segments and what motivates each one to adopt and utilize a new digital technology:
Early Adopters & Visionaries who are motivated by the desire to buy ahead of the crowd for competitive advantage or personal “I’m first” bragging rights.
Pragmatists who only buy with the crowd of other pragmatists and want a 100% whole product or solution that helps them fix a critical problem they want resolved.
Conservatives who buy after the crowd so they can get the best price/value outcome from adoption and utilization.
While the initial focus of this work was aimed at the external market, it is now proving to be extremely helpful in getting internal company employees to adopt and utilize new digital technologies like GenAI. Simply put, if your own employees are not motivated to adopt GenAI then it is very unlikely that your customers will be motivated to do so.
Each employee segment has very different motivations to adopt and deploy new digital technologies
The primary reason for low employee adoption is that companies treat all their employees as if they have the same motivation to adopt. In fact, just like the customer market, they too have very different motivations depending on where they fall on the technology adoption lifecycle. To drive widespread employee adoption and utilization, you need to align your internal employee adoption program with these three primary segments:
Early Adopters & Visionaries are motivated by any opportunity to improve their performance and are very comfortable starting with a minimum viable product (MVP) that they think greatly improves their current job function and responsibilities. They are also willing to provide input and feedback on how the product, service, or solution can be enhanced and expanded.
Pragmatists are only motivated to adopt when they see fellow pragmatists who are trying to solve a similar job performance problem or process bottleneck. They also want a whole product or solution, and they never use early adopters as references because they don’t have the same desired outcomes.
Conservatives are motivated when they see multiple successful use case examples and well-established processes that they feel very certain will do what they want done.
To increase employee digital technology adoption, you need to show how it adds business value across the entire organization
The reason so many AI projects have missed their desired outcomes is because they weren’t in service to solving a specific problem and taking advantage of a specific opportunity. They were mostly about deploying a new technology before anyone really understood what it can do and what kind of organizational and operational preparation you have to have in place to do it. Simply put, employees did not see a compelling reason to adopt and utilize GenAI.
In my early GenAI work with clients, we’ve used the 4 Zones Model framework above to identify multiple business value creation needs and opportunities across different operating and functional units. In each case, we identified a specific business value creation priority and then rigorously explored how successfully adopting GenAI could enable or enhance its outcome. As part of that work, we directly tied employee needs, priorities, and benefits into the agreed upon implementation program. Here is an initial breakdown of these examples by zone:
Productivity Zone Business Value Creation:
- Employee Productivity
- Reduce time on low value work
- Increase time on high value work
- Automate Routine Tasks
- Call center interactions
- Supply chain optimization
- Cybersecurity
- Faster breach detection
- Better vulnerability monitoring
Performance Zone Business Value Creation
- Personalized Customer Experiences
- Individualized customer offers
- Efficient order fullfillment
- Increased Data Utilization
- Real time insights
- Predictive analytics
- Accurate Lead Generation
- Better demand forecasting
- Better product fit analysis
Incubation Zone Business Value Creation
- Automated Product Development & Testing
- Fail fast learn fast
- Increased time to value
- Customized Written, Audio & Visual Content
- Better content customer match
- Higher product & service differentiation
- Performing Probabalistic Thinking
- Comparative software solution analysis
- Scenario planning tool
Transformation Zone Business Value Creation
- M&A Analysis
- Faster and more accurate due diligience
- Better culture fit analysis
- New Business Assessment
- Operating model compatability
- Organizational compatability
- Digital Transformation Evaluation
- Zone offense differentiation potential
- Zone defense neutralization potential
Successful adoption of GenAI is a source of increased employee development & retention
One area where early adopters of AI are seeing real impact and value is in employee development and retention. A recent research study conducted by McKinsey documented that 40% of workers said they spend 25% of their time working on mundane, low value, repetitive tasks like sending emails and entering data. A recent study by R. Blumberg showed that knowledge workers waste 32 days per year juggling technologies rather than focusing on generating new business value for customers.
My brother, Geoffrey Moore, developed the core and context framework to draw clear distinctions between the different types of work employees are engaged in across any enterprise. As he states:
Core are those activities (e.g. product development & sales) that increase a company’s sustainable competitive advantage and directly impact the operating and financial performance of the company. The goal is to create true differentiation by giving customers what they want and cannot get from anyone else.
Context are all the other activities (e.g. finance & legal) that must be done but do not directly drive increased revenues, margins, and profits. The goal is to, whenever possible, outsource context work in order to redeploy resources, time, and budget against core work.
The key point here is: the more you can increase an employee’s work on core activities that make a real and direct contribution to the success of the organization, the more likely they are to be fully engaged in their development program and to stay rather than leave.
In many cases, we actually measure the percentage of time spent on core and context (most employees start at 80% context 20% core) and then build a program to shift that ratio to 60-70% core and 20-30% context. GenAI is the perfect tool to take on multiple context functions and activities and thereby help accelerate that shift from low value to high value work for the employee.
There is little debate about the potential disruptive and transformative power GenAI will have on how employees do their jobs and how companies engage with their customers and other key stakeholders. For your company to successfully compete as a digital enterprise, requires you to adopt and deploy GenAI across your organization. That process needs to start with your employees first.
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