97% AI Adoption. So What?
FrequencyApril 30, 202600:05:54

97% AI Adoption. So What?

Companies that have moved furthest on AI are quietly stepping away from adoption as a metric. Charter's Brian Elliott gathered practitioners from Atlassian, Zapier, Udemy, and others — and the consensus is that early AI measurement got captured by vanity stats.

Microsoft put it plainly: "We used to pay attention to adoption. Now we just pay attention to performance."

Zapier's Chief People Officer went further: "97% adoption rates mean almost nothing." ActivTrak research found that time on email, messaging, and admin tools more than doubled among AI users, while focused, uninterrupted work dropped 9%.

Chuck pushes back — he thinks 97% adoption in anything is actually a significant signal, and that abandoning the metric is easier when you never hit it. Jenni connects it to every digital change programme she's run: adoption is a starting point, not a destination. The real question is whether anyone defined the outcome before the rollout started.

https://www.charterworks.com/why-four-tech-companies-say-adoption-is-the-wrong-ai-metric/