What 700 chromed-up engineers taught me about adoption

After putting more than 700 practitioners through the wringer across SIA, Maybank, Prudential, and Manulife, the lesson lands the same every time, choom: AI adoption is a behaviour change, not a tooling drop. The crews that stick with it are not the ones packing the flashiest chrome, they are the crews who ran real work, in role-specific tracks, with internal champions (call them fixers) who kept the momentum humming long after the training jacked out. Corpos love a shiny rig. What actually holds is the crew.

Generic training does not carry over

Slides about prompting do not shift behaviour, choom. Exercises built on the crew’s own codebase do. The single biggest tell for whether a cohort kept running AI was whether the training jacked into their real work instead of toy gonk examples. People adopt the chrome they have already run successfully under real conditions, not the demo a fixer flashed at them once.

Roles need different tracks

An engineer, a tech lead, and a product owner run AI for different jobs, choom. Training the whole crew in one undifferentiated session means everyone gets material that is half-relevant and half-useless gonk. Role-specific tracks, each jacked into that role’s actual work, flatline the one-size session on every metric. Preem beats generic, every run.

Champions, not mandates

A mandate from the corpo up top gets you compliance during the workshop and reversion the week after, guaranteed. The crew deltas straight back to old habits. An internal champion (a respected member of the crew, a real fixer who runs AI preem and helps others jack in) sustains the change. I deliberately grow these fixers during every engagement, because they are the chrome that keeps adoption compounding for the long haul.

What this means for you

If your AI rollout is a tool announcement plus a generic workshop, expect a spike then a fade, choom. The hype flatlines fast. If it is role-specific reps on real work with fixers seeded inside the crew, expect chrome that holds.

This is the heart of enablement & training. See also why AI pilots stall before production and the speaking page for the workshops behind these numbers.