Train before Handing-off

A Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at a major logistics company described his organization’s AI rollout this way: here’s Co-pilot, good luck. Prompt training arrived months after the tool did. In the meantime, teams were left to figure it out on their own, experiment in the dark, and draw their own conclusions about whether it was actually useful.

Most concluded it wasn’t. Not because the tool failed. Because nobody showed them what it could do.

A Data Science Manager at a major global CPG company sees the same pattern from the build side. Teams receive agents and workflows with no context for how to use them effectively. Without that foundation, even a well-built tool gets used at 20% of its potential or abandoned entirely. The gap between what AI can do and what the average user believes it can do is enormous, and training is the only thing that closes it.

The logistics director put it plainly: he’d be significantly less frustrated about being locked out of other tools if his organization helped him unlock another 20% from the one they already approved. That’s not a technology problem. That’s a training problem.

The counter-example comes from Colin McQuay, Senior Director and Head of SRM at Nestle. His organization made a deliberate choice to make AI success visible at every level. Real wins, shared consistently, across the organization. The effect was FOMO. People started coming to his team asking how to get access rather than waiting to be trained. Adoption followed enthusiasm, not the other way around.

That’s the difference between a rollout and a movement. A rollout gives people a tool and hopes they use it. A movement makes people want to use it before they even have access.

Buying AI without training your team isn’t an investment. It’s an expense.