AI for CIOs
Why are employees ignoring your approved AI assistant?
SimplSolutions editorial team · IT leadership · 3 min read
Published
AI-assisted original editorial guidance. Calculations and scenarios are illustrative, not customer results.
Watch one ordinary task
Low adoption can reflect unclear value, poor placement, missing sources or an unreliable answer. Ask a permitted employee to complete a familiar question using the approved route. Observe whether they can find the service, recognize what it supports and take the correct next step. Do not begin with a lecture about innovation or assume every employee needs more training.
Choose a bounded task such as finding the current remote-access guide. Use non-sensitive examples and appropriate employee participation under your policies. Keep task observations separate from performance judgments. The purpose is to improve the service, not create a hidden employee scoring system.
Locate the friction
| Observed behavior | Question to investigate |
|---|---|
| Cannot find the assistant | Is the route where work already happens? |
| Does not know what to ask | Is scope explained with actual examples? |
| Rechecks every answer elsewhere | Are sources visible and reliable? |
| Cannot finish after the answer | Is the next step or owner missing? |
| Stops after a failure | Is there a usable escalation and return path? |
Fix the observed gap before buying more licenses. A clearer entry point may help discovery. A better source may improve trust. A named support route may improve completion. These are different interventions and should not all be labeled change resistance.
Illustrative editorial photograph, not a customer result.
Teach the boundary with examples
Show one supported question, one clarification and one escalation. Explain what information should not be submitted and what the tool cannot authorize. Employees need to know when to use the service and when a person is required. An approved assistant should not prevent them from contacting support when the task remains unresolved.
Test understanding with a short exercise: identify the applicable guide and next owner for a synthetic case. Completion of a training video is not evidence that employees can apply the boundary. Use the feedback to improve guidance and interface copy.
Measure useful adoption
Track accepted task outcomes, repeat use for the intended task, unresolved questions and support effort. Prompt count alone rewards activity without establishing value. A team generating many responses may still be correcting them manually. Record the employee's search and review time alongside IT handling time.
Respect analytics and privacy rules. Private questions, transcripts and tool payloads do not belong in marketing analytics. Use permitted aggregate task measures and keep any necessary operational evidence in the authorized store. Your responsible owners decide what is collected and retained.
Feed unmet demand back into governance
When people ask outside scope, record the task category without unnecessary private details. Give requests a review owner rather than promising immediate capability. Some uses deserve a new bounded pilot, some need clearer documentation and others remain inappropriate. An assistant answering everything is not a healthy adoption target.
Use the shadow-AI intake guide and the AI Knowledge Access Test Sheet. The NIST AI RMF offers broader human-use and risk-management context; this exercise is not an employee-assessment framework. Request a task-focused demo and ask SimplSolutions to show what the employee can actually finish. SimplTraining can support scoped learning while SimplBrain supplies the approved guidance behind it.
Put this to work this week
Ask a willing employee to complete one synthetic ordinary task with the approved route. Record where they pause, whether they can inspect the source and whether they know the next owner. Fix the observed obstacle, then repeat with a fresh case. Keep private prompt content out of marketing analytics. Report task completion and unresolved demand to the service owner instead of declaring success from sign-ins or response volume alone.
