Nine months into an AI rollout, the dashboard says eighty-something percent weekly usage, training completion in the nineties, time-to-first-draft down forty percent. Every number is accurate. Then somebody pulls three client proposals from before and three from after and reads a paragraph from each out loud, and you could swap the client names without anyone noticing.
This episode draws on chapter ten of AI Empowered, the chapter about organizations, and pairs it with a working paper posted in August called “How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT” — the largest look yet at enterprise AI telemetry. Three of its five authors work at OpenAI, two are academics at Columbia and Wharton who did the work as paid contractors for OpenAI, and it studies OpenAI’s own product. Seventeen hundred and sixty-four companies, seventeen and a half million messages, measured six months after adoption. It documents how fast usage is growing, what kinds of firms adopt early, who inside a company actually uses the tool, and what they use it for.
And then, in its own limitations paragraph, it says the thing worth sitting with: the task results “do not measure downstream work products, productivity effects, or changes in organizational routines.” A dataset that size can tell you exactly how much people typed and nothing about whether anything got better. The paper’s own summary line is the one to keep: adoption is only the beginning of deployment.
This show extends the book AI Empowered: The Psychology of Extraordinary Human-AI Collaboration*. Read the first chapter free at https://www.aiempoweredbook.com or get the book on Amazon https://a.co/d/082wePlH
Aaron Douglas runs Auspicious a fractional marketing practice.
