A "Five Whys" Analysis of Low Enterprise AI Adoption ⚙️🤔

Customer Confusion: A leader at AI21 Labs identifies the main problem not as competition, but as "the confusion and lack of education that our customers have... The buyers are bombarded with so much information that it's really hard to make any decision."

A Stanford Professor of Economics, Erik Brynjolfsson, also highlighted this general issue in the AI space, stating, "There's an amazing hype here and billions of dollars are being wasted," because "The real challenge, the bottleneck, is figuring out how to identify business value."

Need for Tangible Value: The founder of Orby.ai advises startups to "find something more tangible, that can show more value." This is echoed by a director at CoreWeave, who states, "What stops mass adoption in the workplace is an understanding of if I knew YXZ company implemented an AI workflow end to end and they realized benefits (case study)."

Brynjolfsson further noted, "Ultimately, the investments 'only matter if they turn into business value, and we're not seeing that right now.'"

Burden on Sales: The initial analysis in research documents frames the problem clearly: "Because the burden of educating overwhelmed customers falls on salespeople, who lack the time and training for this complex change management task." An AI Salesperson also said, "My problem is not the velocity - it's about the confusion and lack of education that our customers have."

Pace of Change: The core issue is that "The rate of technological change outpaces their capacity to learn, and they don't have time for anything that isn't immediately valuable." A McKinsey Global Institute report notes that by 2030, activities using up to 30% of US work hours could be automated, potentially requiring "an additional 12 million occupational transitions."

This rapid shift is echoed by the World Economic Forum's statement: "The world is facing a reskilling emergency. We need to reskill more than 1 billion people by 1030."

Time Scarcity: A key finding from an EngEDU professional was that "one of the strongest difficulties people have for learning is finding the time for it."

Emotional Toll: One salesperson, recalling their initial struggles, described the feeling of knowing you're going to fail: "...you know that you're not gonna have good calls and it takes so much effort." Another salesperson at an AI startup shared, "It really sucks not being good at sales and not being able to get better even when you want to."

Inefficient Formats: One facilitator states, "Lectures are bad. Recorded lectures are even worse." Another learning designer confirms that for document-based learning, "if it's just a g3doc, no one would actually read it." A Learning Designer at a large tech company stated, "Most forms of learning in the corporate world and classroom are passive learning. Videos are passive."

A meta-analysis on reading from paper versus screens found that "readers learned better from paper than screens for expository texts," suggesting prevalent digital formats may be less effective. Effective learning often involves active methods, such as quizzing oneself.

Disruption vs. Value: The learning asks people "to stop working to engage with formats that don't respect their time or solve an immediate problem."

Isolation in Learning: An interviewee from UniversityNow highlighted: "I wanna know I'm not isolated." This is contrasted with async learning, where "A big issue with these async learnings is people don't complete them." Matthew Rascoff advocates for "communalized learning, collective learning." An L&D professional noted MOOCs don’t work because they lack "community, social capital, connection."

Lack of Andragogy: Research points to learning "not built on the principles of andragogy." A Stanford Professor of Education stated, "Cognitive science in education focuses on K-12. There’s a gap in adult learners,” and “We know adults learn differently - but that’s all we know."

The "Expert" & SME Dilemma: Content is often "created by subject matter experts, not teaching experts."

The Curse of Knowledge: SMEs struggle with essential vs. extraneous. An interviewee noted, "Because these googlers are not teachers... they tend to want to give a history... It’s interesting but people don’t come out of it about what it is, how do I use it?" This leads to content with "too much intro/history/not useful info," or putting "Cheese on vegetables." A Training Program Manager noted SME difficulty: "The most intimidating part is how do I write my content, when do I need to break this up."

The Learning Designer is the new "mythical unicorn" and a "scarce, specialized skill (like UX Design was 15 years ago)." An L&D team wished for more: "we have only 1 learning designer... but we wish we could have 3 of her."

A learning designer's pain point: "'The worst thing is that everyone went to school. They think they're an expert in education.'" Another echoed: "Everyone thinks they are an expert in learning... I hate it."

This leads to non-experts ignoring crucial design components because "They don’t understand why these components we ask for and because of that they’re ignored."

The disconnect: A manager agrees AI is critical, but when asked "How much time are you allowing team to upskill?" The answer is "'well, nothing'."

While education becomes "the new healthcare benefit" (EdSurge) and L&D spending increases (Josh Bersin), this investment often fails because the science of learning isn't sufficiently valued or understood.