Six rollouts in two years. Five stalled in week three. One survived. The pattern is so consistent it is almost embarrassing — and it has almost nothing to do with the model the team picked.
The failure mode looks like this: novelty drives 70% adoption in week one. Champion users get bored. The IT champion goes on leave. Nobody owns the integration debt. By week six, the dashboard shows a long tail of weekly active users that quietly trends to zero, and the executive sponsor decides the technology 'wasn't ready'.
What the surviving rollout did differently
The team that made it through did three unglamorous things. They picked one workflow — not five. They removed the old workflow on day one, so there was no fallback. And they made the champion's job easier in a way the champion could feel by Friday, not by quarter-end.
"Most AI rollouts fail not because the model is wrong, but because the workflow it sits inside was already broken."
If you are running a pilot right now, the diagnostic is simple: ask the champion user what they stopped doing because of the tool. If they can't name it, the rollout will not survive Q2.
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