I recently listened to a podcast about digital technology adoption at a manufacturing facility. It emphasized that technology adoption is helped by making the technology and its adoption approachable. Seems kind of obvious, right? Yet it is never really a focus of how we present the technology or the impending change. We talk about simplifying, explaining, dealing with objections, confronting the skepticism.
The way we go about introducing new technology is typically capability first, or, in a sales process, value first and then capability. Then we wait for the reaction and deal with the outcomes in a reactive way. We simplify once people find something complicated. We explain once they are confused. We handle the objections once they show up. So making digital technology, and especially AI technologies, more approachable is a must.
In all my writing and consulting to this point, approachability has been understood as something that is the result, not the starting point. Now, in the last 2-3 months, I am hearing more and more about it. I think it has to do with the turning of the tide, the fact that executives in the operations space are transitioning from a "wait and see" to a "how do we transform" posture. In the general curiosity about AI specifically, I have observed this need to make the technology, and more critically the transformation it requires, more approachable. They see it as a critical element in getting their operations and organization ready.
Why does approachability matter so much? It is not a new idea. Back in 1989 Fred Davis proposed the Technology Acceptance Model, which says people adopt a technology based on two things: whether it is useful and whether it is easy to use. Usefulness usually carries more weight, which is why we lead with value. But ease of use is what gets people to the value. If it takes too much effort to get started, most never get there.
A good example is Rolls-Royce. When they began experimenting with low-code/no-code on Microsoft Power Apps, the question the team kept asking was "what can we do to make this easy to adopt?" They picked a platform with a familiar look and feel for people who already live in Excel and Word. They started with one small team and one use case, a paper checklist. They supported early adopters as champions and set up an internal app store so people could reuse each other's apps. That two-month proof of concept grew into a community of more than 1,000 citizen developers. Rolls-Royce reported savings of 8 to 10 million pounds through 2022, but their chief digital officer said the bigger win was people feeling they can improve their own day-to-day work.
Notice that none of that was about making the technology less capable. It was about making it easier to start.
I see this especially in regulated industries, and the clearest example I know is “paper-on-glass.” It is an unfortunately loaded term that deserves a post of its own, but here is the short version. People have a deep affinity to paper, and in a regulated operation it is also critical for compliance. Paper is tangible. You can touch it and you can see it. The information written on it feels irrefutable, and it is easy to explain. So when a digital solution looks like paper, it looks like something people already know, and that makes it approachable.
That is why, in many cases, I prefer to create initial solutions that resemble paper to ease adoption of digital solutions. I would not call it paper on glass, that is just the term that resonates in the industry as "easy." It really is a digital solution that purposefully looks like paper and therefore makes the technology more approachable. When people have to be educated, convinced, trained, and talked through objections, then the technology and the impending organizational change needed to adopt it are, by definition, not approachable. Approachability is what closes that distance before the skepticism even starts.
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