You bought the licenses. You sent the announcement. Three months later, maybe two people are using it.
Most business owners read that as a tool problem. It usually isn’t.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, using 2025 data, found something specific about AI rollouts.
Among US employees at companies implementing AI, those whose managers actively support their team’s use of it are 8.7 times more likely to report that AI has transformed how work gets done.
And fewer than a third of them say their manager does that.
That figure is self-reported — it measures what people say about their own experience, not audited productivity. For adoption, that’s the right measure anyway. A tool nobody believes in is a tool nobody opens.
The gap isn’t between companies with good AI tools and companies with bad ones. It’s between companies where someone made it safe and normal to use them, and companies where someone sent a link.
Every workplace already has a culture. It isn’t the poster in the break room. It’s the accumulated result of what leadership permits, praises, overlooks and models.
If a bookkeeper tries a new tool, slows down for an afternoon, and gets a comment about it, you’ve taught the whole office something. If someone quietly automates a report and nobody notices, you’ve taught them something too.
Neither of those was a decision anyone wrote down. Both are culture.
In a 200-person company, a new tool spreads through sheer surface area. Enough people try it that somebody figures it out and shows everyone else.
In a 12-person company in Lima or Fort Wayne, there is no surface area. If the two people who would naturally experiment are slammed that month, the tool dies. Quietly, with the invoice still recurring.
Small teams don’t get adoption by accident. Somebody has to make it a specific person’s job to figure out, and then make it safe for that person to be slow at it for a few weeks.
Not a mandate. Four things:
Name a first user, not a rollout. One person, one task, four weeks. Then ask them what broke.
Say out loud that slow is fine. People won’t experiment on a deadline unless someone with authority tells them the deadline moved.
Ask about it in a meeting you already have. If it never comes up, it isn’t real.
Give it rules. People don’t hesitate because they’re lazy. They hesitate because nobody told them what’s allowed in a chat window and what isn’t. Ambiguity reads as risk, and sensible people freeze in front of risk.
Here at Tomorrow’s Technology Today, we don’t just help clients adopt AI — we use it ourselves, every day, across the business.
That didn’t happen all at once, and it didn’t happen by announcement.
Our sales and marketing team relies on it for research and content, while our service desk uses AI to assist with ticket creation and triage, helping issues get routed and resolved faster. Technicians turn to it to research solutions in real time, and our purchasing team uses it to compare vendors, products, and buying criteria before making a decision.
On the project side, our PM and estimating group uses AI to help build out Statements of Work, and our engineers are using it to develop PowerShell scripts and Power Automate flows that make our proactive maintenance even more efficient.
It’s become part of how we work — not a replacement for our people, but a tool that helps them work smarter and move faster.
We’re an IT company, so here’s our bias stated plainly: we think that fourth item on the list above is where most businesses are stuck.
We talk to companies across Northwest Ohio and Northeast Indiana where AI is already in the building — someone is pasting client data into a free chatbot on their lunch break — and there is no policy, no guidance, and nobody who has said what’s acceptable. At that point it isn’t an adoption problem anymore. It’s an exposure problem wearing an adoption problem’s clothes.
Getting the rules written is usually what unsticks the culture. People use the tools once they know they won’t get in trouble for it.
It’s also worth being honest about which problems AI is actually the answer to. Buying the tool before naming the problem is its own expensive habit.
If you want to talk through where AI is showing up in your business and what your team should and shouldn’t be putting into it, we offer 10-minute discovery calls.
Call us at (419) 678-2083 or visit www.TomTechToday.com/DiscoveryCall to schedule your call.
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of Technology Times. Read the full issue →