The Adoption Spread

Now stand where that supervisor stands, because it’s closer to your chair than the coworker’s is. From up there, nothing looks wrong. Someone is enthusiastic about the tool you paid for. Usage is up. Nobody has filed a ticket saying “Dave’s AI habit is costing me eight hours a week,” because there’s no field for that on any form you own. The cost is real and it’s landing on the person who wrote that post, in hours nobody logged, on a calendar you’ll never see.

The comments are worse than the post. One commenter described a months-long argument with the department head running the company’s SharePoint sites, who insisted he needed a special admin permission to add text to a hero box because the AI told him so, and kept forwarding the AI’s answers as evidence. It escalated to multiple C-levels. The company paid for SharePoint training. He’d been in the wrong menu.

Another described a room of twenty, CEO and CFO included, evaluating estimating software. Someone mentioned a colleague had vibe coded a tool for their department. The colleague was in the room, so he asked what it was written in. “I think JavaScript.” Where’s the data stored? Not sure. Do you log into it, or does it just run? It just runs.

That’s not a story about one careless employee. It’s a story about a company that no longer knows what it owns.

The sharper end of it showed up on r/ExperiencedDevs, where a developer asked how many others had been assigned to what he called AI code remediation. His own answer: 30 to 70 percent of his time over six months, refactoring code other people generated, excluding cleanup of his own AI-assisted work. He didn’t volunteer. He was assigned, because the codebase had reached the point where nobody could tell what it did without asking an AI to explain it back to them.

Here’s what makes this so hard to see from where you sit. In the sysadmin thread, someone said they’d started logging these interactions as time sinks in their weekly updates. The reply underneath: “I was doing this but was asked not to report it anymore. Seems the people above don’t want to hear anything negative about AI.” Whatever your reporting says about adoption, it’s passing through people who’ve worked out that bad news about AI reads as resistance.

The spread, not the average

What you’re looking at is an adoption spread. One tool, one rollout, one set of licenses, and a range of outcomes so wide that the average across it tells you nothing. At the top, someone who already knows the domain uses the tool as leverage and gets genuinely faster, and you never hear about it, because from the outside they’re just doing their job. At the bottom, someone without that knowledge produces volume nobody can evaluate, including them. Nothing in your business actually happens at the average.

This has been measured, not just griped about. Harvard and Boston Consulting Group ran a field experiment with 758 consultants and found what the researchers named the jagged frontier: inside the model’s competence, AI assistance produced large gains, and on a task deliberately designed to sit outside it, the same assistance cut correctness by 19 percentage points. Same firm, same tool, same trained professionals. The effect changed sign depending on which side of an invisible line the work fell, and the only thing that lets a person notice they’ve crossed it is knowing enough to check.

Most people can’t check, and they know it. In Stack Overflow’s 2025 developer survey, the top frustration, named by 66 percent, was AI solutions that are almost right but not quite, and 46 percent said they distrust the accuracy of what the tools give them against 33 percent who trust it. Almost right is the expensive failure mode because it survives a glance. Catching it takes someone who could have done the work without the tool, and where nobody in the loop can, almost right ships and quietly becomes maintenance.

You bought an amplifier

Everyone reaches for the same phrase: force multiplier. Sit with the arithmetic in it. A multiplier has no direction of its own. Feed it competence and it returns more competence. Feed it confident ignorance and it returns that too, faster, in greater volume, in complete sentences and a professional tone. An accelerator only goes one way. You didn’t buy an accelerator. You bought an amplifier, and the sign on the output was set before the tool arrived.

That changes what a rollout is. Handing out licenses hands out amplification, and where the judgment underneath varies, the tool widens every gap it touches. Your strongest people get stronger, then spend the gain covering the widened bottom. You pay for the software twice: once on the invoice, once out of the capacity of the people you can least afford to burn.

Which is why both instinctive responses fail. Ban it and you give up the top of the spread, where the returns live, and you get shadow usage anyway. Mandate it and you widen the spread while measuring attendance and calling it adoption. Neither one touches the variable that decides your return.

What closes a spread is unglamorous, and it doesn’t scale the way a license does. It’s coaching inside the actual work. Not a training day and a slide deck about prompting, but someone beside that department head while he builds the thing, at the moment he’s about to accept an answer he has no way to evaluate, asking what he doesn’t yet know to ask. How would you check that? Where does this data live? What happens when it’s wrong at 4pm on a Friday?

Make the cleanup countable while you’re at it. If usage is the only quantity anyone reports, you’re flying on one instrument. Ask your best people how many hours a week go to rework that didn’t exist two years ago, and take the answer seriously enough that it changes something. If the number is uncomfortable, the measurement is working.

The specialist who wrote that post will probably leave. People carrying an invisible tax usually do, and they rarely name it on the way out, because “my coworker uses too much Copilot” doesn’t survive an exit interview. The supervisor who encouraged it will be genuinely surprised, because from that chair the tool worked exactly as advertised.