Want Real AI Adoption? Teach Less, Change More
Creating an AI curriculum alone won’t get you genAI adoption. You must focus on your culture. You must inspire people.
The first instinct for companies to adopt genAI is often to spin up a curriculum. Get some courses on prompt engineering. Add a learning hub. Host a webinar with a catchy title. In short: throw the standard learning habits at the problem.
It’s a well-meaning move. And frankly, it’s necessary. People do need to understand the basics of LLMs to use them responsibly. But here’s the catch:
No one adopts their way into a new future just because they passed a quiz.
GenAI is not Excel 2.0. It’s not “just another tool” in the stack. It challenges how people think, create, and collaborate. It rewrites what a good first draft looks like. It redistributes where value can come from. And it does all of that with an uncanny, sometimes unnerving ease.
That means adoption won’t come from knowledge alone—it has to be cultural.
You’re Not Teaching. You’re Shifting Norms.
Ask any organization trying to make GenAI part of its everyday fabric, and you’ll hear this tension: People are interested, but usage is shallow. Or inconsistent. Or reserved for a few brave early adopters.
What’s missing isn’t information. It’s energy. Belief. Permission. Reinforcement. All the messy, emotional, very human parts of change that sit beneath the surface.
If you want to move beyond the curriculum and into actual transformation, here are a few starting moves that matter more than you might think:
1. Inspire People on the Power of LLMs (in fun ways)
Within cap markets, things like image and video creators might not be the best use cases, but these tools can be used to ‘wow’ and inspire people on what can be done with these tools. Let the teams explore what these tools can do in a fun way and in parallel they are learning the magnitude of these models. Don’t tell executives how impactful these models will be, show them.
It sounds trivial, but these playful, low-stakes experiments unlock imagination. They make people lean in. And they give AI a friendly face—one that doesn’t immediately trigger fears about job security or compliance.
Once you’ve built curiosity and comfort, then you can shift to the more structured and strategic use cases.
2. Find and Empower Your AI Champions
In every company, there are always a few people who get it early. Not just technically, but emotionally. They see how GenAI could reshape their work or unlock new creativity—and they’ve started playing with it already.
These people are gold.
Give them airtime. Let them run short demos. Invite them to share tips, stumbles, and use cases in team meetings or on Slack. Don’t worry about polish. In fact, rough is better—it keeps things real.
You’re not trying to roll out a center of excellence (yet). You’re trying to create a sense of “people like me are doing this too.”
3. Drive Micro-Habits
Adoption doesn’t come from big declarations—it comes from small, consistent behaviors.
If you want GenAI to become part of the workflow, focus on micro-habits. These are low-effort actions that nudge people to experiment, reflect, and repeat.
Try things like:
Reminders in the flow of work (“Start with a GPT draft” in templates or Slack).
Simple routines like “Prompt of the Week” or 5-minute AI check-ins in team standups.
Sharing forums—Slack channels, quick demos, or “what I tried” sessions that celebrate even imperfect use.
The goal isn’t to drive mastery overnight. It’s to make using AI feel normal. Familiar. Expected.
That’s how habits form. And that’s how culture shifts.
Here’s the big idea: a curriculum informs. But a culture transforms.
If you want GenAI to live inside your organization—not just as a tool, but as a new way of thinking—you have to work at the human level. That means identifying your early movers, lowering the stakes, building moments of surprise and delight, and supporting new norms one behavior at a time.
The tech is already powerful. The hard part now is getting people to believe it belongs to them.
That’s where the real work begins.
Want help jumpstarting that belief in your team? At BeaconAP, we blend AI strategy with cultural design—because we know real change takes both.
Let’s build something better, together.