I get to see and help with a lot of Anterprise AI rollouts. Some are brilliant, but most (even in 2026) are surprisingly bad.
I’ve been thinking about and trying to summarize what I think the main difference is, and I think this is the big one.
Weak AI Rollouts
Over 90% of the weak rollouts that I see essentially come down to the board and/or senior leadership saying something like:
AI use is highly encouraged. Everyone should be using AI as much as possible to make themselves more efficient and effective. A portion of your performance assessment will be based on how much AI you are using.
(silence)
No guidance on what to do with AI. How to integrate it. What internal systems AI can talk to. Etc.
Just a vague blanket statement.
Strong AI Rollouts
What I see from successful AI rollouts is quite different. They:
- Assign a person or a team full-time to creating content and documentation and assistance in the rollout
- Make it clear what internal tools are available for employees’ AI’s to use
- Give examples of workflows
- Create short videos explaining how to set things up and showing it working in real-world situations
The most advanced companies I’ve seen go as far as to create an internal AI harness with a bunch of this already configured.
So basically the main difference is hollow vs. solid guidance.
- Don’t just say, “Use AI.”
- Instead, do the work of figuring out how employees can connect AI tools to the company’s applications in practical and useful ways.
And create and share examples.
