You’re measuring AI adoption. You should be measuring AI abandonment
Every CIO can produce an AI adoption dashboard: licenses purchased, seats activated, prompts submitted per week. Boards ask for these numbers, vendors report them and they climb every quarter. What none of them show is whether the tool earned a durable place in anyone’s work. A license counts distribution, not value.
Every CIO can produce an AI adoption dashboard: licenses purchased, seats activated, prompts submitted per week. Boards ask for these numbers, vendors report them and they climb every quarter. What none of them show is whether the tool earned a durable place in anyone’s work. A license counts distribution, not value.
A license counts distribution, not value. An activated seat tells you someone clicked through onboarding once. A prompt count rewards the person who tried a tool five times before giving up exactly as much as the person who uses it daily and depends on it.
Most CIOs concede that much, yet little better has replaced it. Across the C-suite, only 31% of leaders expect to measure generative AI’s return on investment in the next six months. In most boardrooms, adoption metrics are not supplementing ROI; they have replaced it.
Worse, these are usually not your numbers. In most SaaS deployments, the vendor defines the usage metric, instruments it and reports it back in business reviews. That is standard commercial practice rather than bad faith, but it means the criteria behind the number are built to justify license utilization rather than audit your workflows.
The metric that actually shows whether an AI tool works is the one missing from the dashboard: abandonment. It tells you who tried a tool and walked away, how quickly they stopped and where the workflow broke down.
Abandonment is not a vanity metric in reverse. It is the one signal your people produce rather than your vendor. Every day someone decides whether to open the tool, paying in attention and habit. Continuing to pay that cost is a judgment; walking away is the opposite judgment. Nobody fakes that behavior for a dashboard.
In context
- Topic: Estrategia y Gobierno de TI — Decisiones de portafolio, costo total, gobierno y marcos de referencia.
- Source: CIO
- Published: 09/10/2026
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Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.
Why it matters
There is a wide gap between a company that has technology projects and one that has a technology strategy. The first accumulates initiatives; the second decides what it will not do. Moves like this are usually the moment somebody at the top finally wrote down the list of what gets left out.
My filter is always the same: does this change a decision, or only a tool? If at the end of the quarter the same people are approving the same things by the same criteria, there was no transformation, there was a purchase. The difference shows up in the committee minutes, not in the press release.
What usually goes wrong
The classic mistake is confusing the plan with the execution. A three-year roadmap gets approved in a two-hour committee and nobody revisits it until there is a problem. Plans that work get reviewed every quarter and corrected without drama; the ones that do not get defended instead.
What to watch
- Whether business metrics appear or only delivery metrics — cost per transaction beats percentage complete.
- The real calendar of contracts and renewals: that is where you see whether the move was strategic or was an expiry date.
- What gets switched off to fund the new thing; if nothing does, the budget will hurt in six months.
How I read this entry
The way I would bring this down to earth is in three moves: name an owner with their own budget, define two metrics reviewed in committee every month, and set a date on which somebody decides to continue or stop. It is unglamorous, and it is what separates programmes that land from programmes that get discussed.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
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Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
