Half the room couldn’t stop talking about AI. The other half hadn’t opened it since training day.
I’ve watched this split in real teams. One half trades workflows and ideas about what to automate next. The other half sits quietly with nothing to add. Same company, same tools, same rollout.
It is not a training problem
That’s always the first assumption: more sessions, better materials, clearer instructions. None of it closes the gap, because the gap is experience, not understanding (opens in a new tab).
The daily users have each had one small win that made the tool feel essential. The others are still waiting for theirs. You can’t deliver that in a slide deck.
What works instead
A marketing team of ten showed it best. Four people used AI every day; six had touched it once and stopped.
The manager did two things. She paired each daily user with one or two colleagues on live work: a task with a deadline both of them cared about. And she asked the four to share one real example every morning at the huddle: the task AI removed, the prompt they used, the time it saved. Two minutes, nothing polished.
The pairing delivered the first win. The daily examples kept the tool visible between wins.
Within two weeks, four of the six were using it unprompted. The last two came round inside the month.
Why champions work
They hand over the one thing training never can: proof from a peer.
A slide deck says the tool is useful. A colleague holding up the report it just wrote gets believed.
Find your champions. Pair them with the quiet half on real tasks with real deadlines. Then ask for one example a day, said out loud where the whole team can hear it.
Real use is where the habit forms.