Beware of “trophy-style” AI adoption

Most enterprise generative AI investments have yet to deliver the value companies envisioned, and every day, more leaders are recognizing that people lie at the heart of the struggle. In this year’s AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey, 93% of executives leading AI and data efforts identified human issues around culture and change management as the primary obstacle to adoption. Mc Kinsey Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels put it plainly on HBR’s Idea Cast: “Half if not more of the secret sauce” in getting value from AI, he said, “is organizational change, as opposed to technology implementation.” As such, many leading companies have launched initiatives over the past several months to drive AI adoption across their workforces. These efforts run the gamut from carrot-to-stick approaches, with some rolling out hackathon programs and prizes for innovative uses. Others use weekly logins and token consumption as proxies for performance. A PERFORMATIVE APPROACH Leaders are right to focus on the people side of adoption. They need to be deliberate, however, about what they’re encouraging. I’ve learned something in my three decades helping some of the world’s largest companies through culture transformation. Employees prioritize what leaders model, incentivize, and reward. And initiatives built around shallow metrics can do more harm than good. It’s understandable why many leaders today celebrate deliverables simply because they were made with AI, or reward employees for integrating it into workflows. Facing underwhelming internal adoption metrics, many have come to see any increase in AI usage as a win. At my firm, however, we call this “trophy-style” AI adoption—which is to say, a performative approach focused more on usage than results. It’s focused on participation trophies over proof of impact. Leaders need to be wary of this trap. Because as anyone following the “workslop” problem or the emerging research on cognitive atrophy will know, no