Technical readiness isn't the AI problem. It never was.
Think about what's happened with Microsoft Copilot rollouts across thousands of organisations. The licences were purchased, often for the entire company. IT got it configured. Leadership announced it. And then...
Usage stayed flat. People went back to doing things the way they always had.
Not because Copilot doesn't work. It does. But because no one had addressed whether the team trusted it, understood it, or felt safe enough to get it wrong in front of their colleagues.
A tool that works and a tool that's genuinely used — those are completely different things. And the gap between them is where the ROI case quietly falls apart.
70–80% of AI projects fail to deliver expected benefits. Not due to technical shortcomings. Due to lack of adoption.
The organisations seeing real returns aren't the ones with the best technology stack.
They're the ones who figured out that buying the licences is the easy part — and invested the same energy into the human side of deployment as they did the technical one.
Before the next renewal conversation, the question worth asking isn't "Does the technology work?"
It's "Do our people have what they actually need to use it?"
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