The situation behind the numbers above
Nine months after rolling out AI copilots firm-wide, adoption was wildly uneven — some teams had fully embedded AI into daily work, others weren't using the approved tools at all, and 61% of employees admitted quietly using ungoverned consumer AI tools instead, some with client information.
I ran the rollout through ADKAR, not a training calendar: Awareness campaigns, a real answer to "what's in it for me," role-specific hands-on practice, and a champion network with reinforcement checkpoints — the same change-management architecture used for any other durable behavior change.
Adoption stalled hardest wherever there was no champion driving it locally, and partners — not front-line staff — were consistently the last to adopt. Shadow AI wasn't a rule-breaking problem; it was a governance vacuum problem.