Technology Adoption Curve and AI Adoption

The Classic Pattern of Adoption

The PC, the internet, and the cloud have all followed a similar pattern of adoption, known as the technology adoption curve. This curve describes the stages through which an organization or individual goes through when adopting new technology. The stages are:

• Innovators: Adventurous individuals who are the first to try new technology.
• Early Adopters: Opinion leaders who quickly embrace new tech and help spread the word.
• Early Majority: The majority of the organization adopts the technology before the average person.
• Late Majority: The organization becomes more skeptical and waits until there’s broad acceptance of the innovation.
• Laggards: The organization actively resists change and risks falling behind.

AI Adoption Curve

AI is following a similar pattern of adoption as previous disruptive technologies. Organizations that have successfully undergone technology transformations in the past can do it again with AI.

Accelerating the AI Adoption Curve

To accelerate the AI adoption curve, organizations need to address three key areas:

Access

• AI is a significant investment, and budgets have not kept pace.
• Leaders are forced to prioritize certain roles or functions over others, giving AI tools to only a select few.
• This approach makes sense given financial constraints, but it’s not setting an organization up for long-term success.

ROI

• With the cost of AI bumping up against limited budgets, there’s pressure to prove the ROI of AI.
• The most significant ROI comes from wholesale change—redesigning entire business processes with AI at the center.
• By redesigning business processes for AI, leaders can measure how AI is contributing to the bottom line through reduced costs and increased revenue.

Governance

• Governance is crucial to delivering secure and compliant AI.
• If employees are not given company-approved AI, they may bring their own AI tools to work, which can put company data at risk.
• Fragmentation hampers a unified approach to AI adoption and leads to an IT pro’s worst nightmare: managing a growing system of disparate, bespoke AI tools.

The Access-ROI Cycle

Providing AI access to more employees increases ROI, which should unlock budgets to give more access, leading to more ROI.

A Way Forward

At Microsoft, we recently introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat—a free and secure AI chat experience with access to pay-as-you-go agents. By pairing it with M365 Copilot, our best-in-class AI assistant for work, leaders can more easily navigate the AI adoption curve and accelerate their organization’s transformation.

Regardless of what AI tools your organization uses, the ideal state is a unified solution that can meet the varying needs of employees and functions across the organization, offer a consistent user experience, and provide standardized governance and controls. Scaling adoption across an organization is critical, and no one should be left behind.

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