Your AI Adoption dashboard is glowing green...
95% of your team has logged in to the new $2M platform.
On paper, it is a massive success. In reality, though, it’s the beginning of a catastrophic money leak. A recent WalkMe report found that companies lose ~$104 million annually from poor software adoption, and your investment is feeding directly into that number through a phenomenon we call “AI Theater.”
Behind the Curtain of "AI Theater"
This “performance” comes with an expensive price tag. Here is what’s actually happening when you pull back the curtains:
- 78% use unapproved “Shadow AI” tools because official solutions don’t fit their workflows.
- 60% say AI takes longer to figure out than doing the task manually.
- 45% pretend to understand AI in meetings to avoid scrutiny.
- 49% hide their AI use to avoid judgment.
- Only 7.5% have received extensive training, while 23% have received none at all.
And the result? You’re funding tools that create anxiety instead of productivity and risk instead of true results. The journey from investment to impact requires a comprehensive, deliberate system.
A Better Path Forward: The A.C.T Framework
The journey from investment to impact requires a comprehensive approach. At Elevida, we use the A.C.T. Framework to transform AI spending into measurable business outcomes.
1. Audit Your Reality
- Most adoption dashboards show you adoption rates and login metrics. What they don’t tell you is whether AI is actually making work better or just making it different. We audit the data (including behavioral data) that matters: which workflows are genuinely faster, where quality is improving (or slipping), and what your top performers are doing differently (and how to “bottle” that to share across the organization). This gives you the truth your current metrics can’t; where AI is actually creating real value and where it’s just burning money.
2. Calibrate Your Culture & Controls
- With clear insights, you can lead with confidence instead of assumptions or gut feelings. This means creating a Governance Playbook that enables high-value AI use while managing risks. It also means building psychological safety so your team can be fully honest about what’s working and what isn’t. When people feel safe sharing the truth, their feedback becomes one of your most valuable data points.
3. Transform Performance into Profit
- This is where strategy becomes ROI. Use your insights to create highly tailored training and offer behavioral support where it matters the most, scale the behaviors of your top performers, and tie AI adoption directly to P&L outcomes. This is how you turn isolated instances of success into an organizational-wide competitive advantage.
The Cost of Waiting
The gap between your AI investment and actual performance is real, and it’s very, very expensive: $104 million in lost value, mounting security risks, and competitors who are figuring this out faster.
Getting this right requires a deliberate system that puts people at the center of technology adoption and not one-off training.
