Don’t Be a Laggard

The conversation about AI adoption has been reduced to a personality split.

There are people who experiment. And there are people who wait for someone to hand them an instruction manual.

The distinction matters. But it stops short of the real problem.

Experimentation, critical thinking, and outcome driven adoption are all valid principles. What they do not address is the operational condition that determines whether any of them are actually possible.

Chris Douglass, Director of Sales, CRM at monday.com, describes a growing divide on teams. Some employees actively test, build, and adapt. Others wait. His advice is to stop waiting for the perfect process before you begin.

It assumes there is something stable enough to experiment with. It assumes there are workflows to extend, decision standards to reference, and a baseline that tells you whether the experiment produced anything useful.

For many businesses, that baseline does not exist.

Not because people are lagging. Because the operations were never maintained or documented in the first place.

Building versus Copying

Protect critical thinking.

Douglass makes a clear distinction between employees who build their own AI workflows and those who copy someone else’s prompts.

The reasoning is correct. Workflows need to reflect how you actually think and work.

But building your own workflows requires knowing how your business actually operates. In turn, the reward is being able to copy your own unique operations, systemize, scale, and grow.

If that knowledge lives in people’s memories, inboxes, shared folders, or verbal handoffs, the system being built has no foundation to anchor it.

What gets built may reflect how one person works, not how the business is supposed to operate.

Bottom Line

Being a laggard is not only about reluctance to try AI.

A business can be actively deploying tools, running experiments, and generating outputs while still operating without documented standards.

The operational divide is quieter than the adoption divide. And it is far more expensive.

Businesses that perform in an AI enabled environment will not just be the ones that experiment. They will be the ones that know what they are operating, what they expect, and what standard the output will be measured against.

That starts with operational documentation.

Expert Tip

Before assigning AI to a workflow, ask this question:

If a new team member joined today, could they understand how that workflow operates without asking anyone?

If the answer is no, consider seeing what LiveDoc Solutions can do to help.

Click here to schedule your demo

Source: Chris Douglass, “Bridging the AI Divide on Your Team,” monday.com, published via Responsible AI.