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Your AI rollout is underway.
Is anything actually changing?

You bought the licenses. Your teams completed the training. Your usage dashboard looks healthy. Whether people work any differently is a separate question, and almost nobody is measuring it.

Checkbox Adoption is research into that gap, based on interviews with 14 senior leaders across 10 sectors and 5 countries.

When adoption becomes
a checkbox

AI adoption is usually measured by what is easiest to count:

  • licenses assigned
  • training completed
  • logins recorded
  • prompts entered

None of these shows whether people work differently. I call this Checkbox Adoption: an organization can report that AI has been rolled out, while everyday work has barely changed. This whitepaper looks at what sits underneath the numbers.

What's inside

01

Why adoption numbers can look healthy while work stays the same

How licenses, training completion and usage metrics can rise while people keep working as before.

02

The five conditions behind real AI adoption

The organizational conditions that shape whether people change how they work.

03

What I heard from leaders making AI adoption work

What they do differently, and where leaders most often underestimate the challenge.

From the findings

“Concerns near 90 percent, voiced concerns near zero.”

“Waiting through official channels, acting through shadow ones.”

“Nothing came off anyone's plate.”

The research behind
the framework

I wanted to understand what gets in the way of AI adoption inside organizations, beyond usage dashboards and training completion rates. So I interviewed 14 senior leaders between March and May 2026.

14senior leaders interviewed
10sectors
5countries: Germany, Switzerland, Spain, UK, Australia
40 to 100,000+employees, from the smallest to the largest organization in the sample

The five
conditions

  • Adaptability Mindsetwhether change reads as an opportunity or a threat.
  • Psychological Safetywhether problems get raised or hidden.
  • Empowerment Orientationwhether adoption spreads across the organization or bottlenecks at leadership.
  • Action Stylewhether teams test early or wait for proof.
  • Adoption Capacitywhether people have the time and energy to absorb something new.

Together they form the Organizational Adoption Profile, the framework I use to diagnose what shapes whether AI adoption takes hold.

Dr. Xenia Wade
Dr. Xenia Wade

AI Adoption Strategist · PhD in HRM · Former Accenture Manager

I help organizations find out what is blocking AI adoption, and change how people work with AI. At Accenture, I led change management for Microsoft 365 rollouts reaching 30,000+ users.

More about me →

Get
the research

Free, 14 interviews, five conditions, and what leaders making AI adoption work do differently.

Send me the whitepaper

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