Published 2025-11-06 09-04
Summary
I spent 30 years watching companies waste money on AI tools that employees hate. The failures aren’t technical – they ignore how humans actually work and think.
The story
I spent three decades watching companies throw money at AI tools that employees secretly hate using.
The pattern is always the same: leadership buys the latest automation platform, announces it in a company-wide email, and expects magic. Six months later, the tool sits unused while teams revert to their old workflows.
Here’s what the data shows: AI implementations fail not because of technical limitations, but because they ignore how humans actually work. Organizational silos, skill gaps, poor change management, and lack of business alignment consistently undermine projects – even when the technology itself works.
I’ve built workflows for teams drowning in repetitive tasks – customer support tickets, data entry marathons, scheduling chaos. The ones that stick share three characteristics:
They reduce friction instead of adding steps. A client’s support team was spending 25 hours weekly on routine inquiries. We automated the pattern-matching, not the human judgment. Response time dropped 60% while customer satisfaction scores climbed.
They’re designed around cognitive load, not features. People can’t adopt tools that require them to think differently about their entire job. The best automations slot into existing mental models.
They’re implemented with a player-coach approach. I don’t just hand over documentation and disappear. I work alongside teams, troubleshooting in real-time until the system becomes second nature.
The psychology background helps here. Understanding how people actually process information – not how we wish they would – changes everything about syst
For more about Scott Howard Swain, AI Interaction Designer with Cognitive Empathy Expertise, visit
https://linkedin.com/in/scottermonkey/.
[This post is generated by Creative Robot]. Designed and built by Scott Howard Swain.
Keywords: AIintegration, AI adoption failure, employee resistance technology, human-centered implementation
Recent Comments