What is the AI Adoption Workbook?

AI adoption is where AI-powered improvements in productivity start—and, all too often, where people’s thinking about AI stops.

It’s similar to the way many people start their journey to becoming a tennis player, or a skier, or a mountain climber: with a trip to the sporting goods store. You can dress like a sports star by spending an hour picking out clothes and burdening your credit card; becoming an actual sports star is more work.

Yes, AI adoption is actually important. In fact, it’s so important that it’s best done with a view to the longer game. 

So we started by producing the AI Adoption Guide,  published last week. We will be producing Guides for many steps in this journey—governance, proficiency, and more.

But adoption is so important that we’ve also produced a companion volume, the AI Adoption Workbook. The Workbook helps you put all the learning and good advice in the AI Adoption Guide to practical use.

What’s In the AI Adoption Workbook?

The AI Adoption Workbook contains specific descriptions and directions around AI implementation in the enterprise, including:

• The high cost of enterprise AI tools
• Scaling up AI, from pilots to company-wide deployment
• Building useful AI dashboards
• Adoption benchmarks by industry
• Adoption benchmarks by company department
• Driving adoption in non-technical teams

These descriptions are leavened with pointers to relevant information in The State of Enterprise AI 2026, our recent report from the trenches of AI adoption. (An example infographic from the report is shown in Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Barriers to AI adoption from our survey.
(Source: The State of Enterprise AI 2026)

We have set out to avoid setting out best practices that might sound good in theory, but fall short in practice. Instead, we want to tie good advice to an incisive look at what people are actually doing, today, in the real world.

This gives you the best chance of learning from other people’s experience, so you can move quickly and surely to solid results from your AI investments. It’s like having a coach for a sport such as those I mentioned above—except our Guides are free.

How Can I Best Prepare for AI Adoption?

The AI Adoption Guide and the AI Adoption Workbook lay out the framework for most issues that might come up in creating and implementing an AI adoption strategy for your organization.

Note that you still need to do AI adoption planning carefully, even if you already have a fair amount of AI adoption. In fact, the organic, mostly bottom-up efforts that individuals and teams have already started are vital input into your planning. What’s different is that planning will fit those efforts into a long-term framework that amplifies current efforts, spots and addresses gaps, and ensures that effort is both achieved and tied to company goals, all the way through to ROI.

Here’s how to convert the material into an action plan:

1. Read through the material. Some of the concepts and vocabulary might be new to you; take the opportunity to learn these basics.
2. Convert the Guide and the Workbook into an action plan. Use the Guide to learn the steps, and the Workbook to anticipate problems, and to set targets for adoption and proficiency.
3. Refine your planning steps and goals. Refer to our State of Enterprise AI Report 2026 and sources specific to your industry and company makeup to see what others are doing.
4. Consider how to do measurement. “What gets measured gets done,” as management guru Peter Drucker said long ago. You need to know your specific starting point and be able to track progress.
5. Work measurement into your plan. The Workbook tells you how to create your own measurement framework, and the next section describes an alternative.
6. Get buy-in. Tell colleagues how your approach will encourage past and future organic AI efforts, while steadily building up a more structured approach to AI that will help your company achieve its goals. Then share your plan and take in feedback.
7. Start. The first step is to find out what is currently happening with AI in your organization, including internal apps that include AI capabilities.

Pro tip: Don’t depend too much on surveys to find out about AI adoption. AI is starting to share the work of employees; you can even consider agentic AI apps as part of an expanded vision of what makes up a workforce. You wouldn’t depend on a survey to find out how many employees you have, what their job descriptions are, and their salaries. Don’t depend on surveys to find out about spending on, and use of AI.

What’s the Fastest Path to AI Adoption?

The AI Adoption Guide and the AI Adoption Workbook are vendor-independent. You can use them to make a useful, constructive, effective plan no matter which tools and what vendors you are, and aren’t, using.

So please excuse a brief mention here of how Larridin can speed your AI adoption efforts, and make them more effective.

Larridin is a measurement and management framework for AI adoption, proficiency, and impact. Like the best tools of all kinds, it makes hard things easy, and impossible things possible.

Larridin gives you a dashboard that shows you all the AI apps in use in your organization, whether used on company licenses and log-ins (easier) or individual end-user licenses and log-ins (harder).

You can’t afford to get this wrong; but without a powerful platform like Larridin, it’s almost impossible to get it right. Figure 2 shows a sampling of important elements from Larridin Scout, our flagship product.

Figure 2. Dashboard elements from Larridin Scout. (Source: Larridin website)

Larridin then takes you well past adoption, into proficiency with AI usage and impact on organizational metrics such as ROI. But all that is a story for later Guides in this series. (And one more Workbook at the end; it’s a doozy.)

For a comprehensive treatment of adoption strategy, measurement frameworks, and organizational maturity models, see the full AI Adoption Guide and AI Adoption Workbook.

Larridin is the AI execution intelligence platform that gives enterprises complete visibility into AI adoption, proficiency, and impact across every tool, team, and employee. If your leadership cannot answer “where are we on AI adoption?” with data, Larridin can fix that.