People Don’t Adopt AI, They Adopt the Answer to Their ProblemsPeople Don’t Adopt AI, They Adopt the Answer to Their Problems

A vendor announcing an AI agent or assistant is so frequent as to not really be news these days, but when I was scanning a Monday, February 10, news release from the workflow management and collaboration platform Monday.com, a quote from Daniel Lereya, Chief Product and Technology Officer, stood out: "People adopt products, not technology."

He's right. If you told people, "I have an amazing device for you -- it bundles in tiny microprocessors, lithium-ion batteries, a liquid crystal display, and some fast-Fourier-transform algorithms. You won't want to put it down!!" -- would that be a compelling sales pitch? Would it be immediately evident to people how it could make their work experience easier? No.

However, if you said, "I have an amazing device for you -- this mobile phone will allow you to compose or edit documents and share them with others, communicate with your colleagues via instant messages or voice call, take photos of your receipts and file expense reports, and it frees you from having to be in an office!" -- that's a recipe for people embracing a new technology. Because they didn't see the phone as a new technology. They saw it as a means to make their lives better by making work tasks easier.

A lot of the ambivalence around AI adoption is rooted in workers' entirely-reasonable concerns that this technology will make their already-overloaded jobs even more demanding, or their suspicions that the AI is there as part of a company's push to reduce the human workforce. It's a suspicion rooted in history -- as the IEEE Computer Society reported eight years ago, "Warehouse Robots Boosting Productivity—and They Don’t Call in Sick." Or just google for "digital agents don't get sick" and scroll through the pages upon pages of results extolling all the ways in which these tidy bundles of code are superior to the erratic meatsacks currently keeping companies afloat.

The eternal promise of technology is the promise of boosting production while reducing the associated human labor costs. And for those human laborers, that promise looks more like a threat.

So how will AI ultimately get sold to the enterprise? Think of how mobile phones became the norm in the enterprise: when they were seen as a win-win proposition for workers and managers. The reasons may have been different -- workers like the flexibility of not being chained to a desk to remain reachable, while managers liked that they could reach workers at any time -- but the end result was the incorporation of the technology into the enterprise.

The question now is: What is the win-win proposition for AI? Telling a workforce how excited you are about supplementing them with digital labor that never gets sick isn't going to win hearts and minds. But telling a workforce how you recognized their pain points and you have a fix? That's the win-win proposition.