Why your staff don’t use the tool you approved
You bought it, announced it, and six weeks later usage is four people. The reason is almost never the reason given in the meeting.
A pattern we see often enough to describe: a company selects an AI tool carefully, approves it, announces it, and then a quarter later discovers that a handful of people use it and everyone else went back to what they were doing.
The explanation offered internally is usually « change resistance » or « they need training ». In our experience it is almost always one of three much more boring things.
One: it is one click too far
If the approved tool lives at a separate address requiring a separate login, and the unapproved one is already open in a tab, the unapproved one wins. Every time, regardless of quality.
The fix is not a reminder email. It is putting the tool where the work already is, or at minimum removing the second login. Distance in clicks beats capability in almost every adoption contest.
Two: nobody knows what it is for
« You can use it for anything » is a true statement that produces no usage. People do not start from a blank box; they start from a task they were already doing.
Name three specific tasks, by name, that people in your company do weekly. « Summarising a supplier email thread. » « Drafting the reply to a standard enquiry. » « Turning site notes into a report. » Adoption starts from examples, not from possibilities.
Three: the first attempt failed and nobody said anything
Someone tried it in week one, got a poor result because they asked badly, concluded the tool was not good, and never mentioned it. Ten people did that independently and none of them told you.
This is why the 4 February point about a named person mattered. Not a mailbox, not an intranet page — one colleague whose reaction to « this thing gave me rubbish » is to sit down for five minutes and look.
What to do in the next two weeks
Ask five people who are not using it, individually, what happened. Not in a meeting, where nobody says « I could not find it ».
You will get your answer in about forty minutes, and it will be cheaper to fix than the training programme you were considering.