I've been implementing new technology for businesses since before "the web" was a thing people talked about. I've watched companies navigate every major shift—from desktop computing to the internet to mobile to cloud to this world-changing AI.
Here's what I've learned: the technology is rarely the hard part.
The hard part is people. It's getting humans to change how they work. It's overcoming the fear of looking incompetent while learning something new. It's building trust that the new way will actually be better than the old way.
AI is no different. The companies struggling with AI implementation aren't struggling because the technology is too complex. They're struggling because change is hard, and most vendors skip right past the human factors to talk about features.
When I work with a team on AI implementation, I spend as much time thinking about adoption as I do about configuration. Who's going to resist this change? Why? What do they need to feel safe trying something new? How do we make early wins visible so skeptics become believers?
The teams that succeed with AI almost always have someone internally championing the change—not just from a technology perspective, but from a "this is going to make your life better" perspective. They've addressed fears before features. They've created psychological safety for people to admit when they don't understand something.
This is why I'm skeptical of any AI implementation that's purely technical. If nobody's talking about how the humans are going to adapt—how they are going to benefit—that implementation is probably going to fail.
After 35 years, I can tell you: the technology always works eventually. Whether your team embraces it or not is a different question entirely.