Perspective
Adoption by design: the change management behind enterprise AI
By Richard White ·
Free, no form.
Abstract
A system that passes every technical test can still fail to change the business, because the people who must work differently were never asked, never shown their future role, or never given a stake in the result. This sixteen-page perspective is for business, data and technology leaders who have, or are about to have, a working capability.
It sets the public evidence beside two patterns from large institutions: a consolidated analytics team that never joined the business it served, and expert users who judged an AI assistant against their own work. It covers ownership, stakeholder resistance, redesigning the work, hubs where business and technology share one backlog, and hackathons designed to end in an owner and a decision.
It closes with the people work for each of Frame, Prove, Build and Run, an eight-question adoption worksheet, and a source list. Survey figures are reported with their limits, and Sol Rashidi’s practitioner work is cited and paraphrased.
Decision it supports
How the work and the review will change, and who funds the review effort.
What you will produce
A review-capacity estimate and a manager routine for the first weeks of use.
See it worked through in a guide
Claims package 1.1.0 · 26 October 2026. Synthetic worked example: team A, group disability, region 2. Read-only preparation of the assigned case; examiners retain every case decision. Hold candidate 1.0.0 after an unrelated employee’s claim is returned. In the synthetic decision, accept 1.1.0 for a monitored team A rollout only after prior-claims history is disabled and the remaining scope passes a fresh evaluation. All figures, evidence and sign-offs in that guide are invented; the paper provides the underlying method.
In the paper
Three passages, as published
The test
Ask who will do their job differently on the first Monday after release, and whether they have agreed to.
Design principle
Give the experts authority over the evaluation. People who wrote the test can’t easily dismiss the result.
The rule
Every hackathon project ends with a decision and an owner, or it ends.
Next step
Discuss this paper against your own program.
A free sixty-minute working session with Richard on your top gaps. You leave with a one-page summary within three business days, and three next questions.