Designed to Stick: The Learning Behind a Real AI Transformation

What does it actually take to make AI adoption stick?

Many organisations invest in AI training, yet very little changes in day-to-day work. In this session, you'll hear the story of a real AI transformation; how one department moved from uncertainty and low adoption to measurable behaviour change in just two weeks.

Rather than another discussion about AI strategy, this session explores the practical learning design that helped people build confidence, create AI assistants for their own work, and continue using AI long after the programme ended.

What you'll learn

You'll leave with practical insights on:

• Why most AI training fails to create lasting behaviour change.
• How to help hesitant employees build confidence with AI.
• The learning design behind exceptional AI adoption.
• How peer learning and psychological safety accelerate change.
• How to measure and scale AI transformation across an organisation.

A real-world case study

This wasn't a pilot with AI enthusiasts. The program involved:

• 35 participants, most starting with little or no AI experience.
• Many worried that AI would replace their jobs.
• Two-thirds had never even used their organisation's approved AI tools.

After just two weeks of short daily practice on their own work:

• 88% built at least one AI assistant for a genuinely tedious task.
• 97% said they intended to continue using AI.

A level of behaviour change that few learning programmes achieve.

Why it worked

Success didn't come from a top-down mandate. Instead, the program focused on:

• Building AI fluency before expecting transformation.
• Creating psychological safety to experiment.
• Using peer demonstrations to build momentum.
• Measuring change before and after with validated assessment tools.

Those results transformed a small experiment into a programme now expanding across multiple departments.

Meet the speakers

Bryn Austin Professor and Interim Co-Chair, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Bryn will share how the department approached AI adoption, overcame resistance, and created lasting behaviour change.

Kirstin Austin Chief Learning Strategist, Meadow Consulting, Impact Partner, Lead with AI, Former Chief Learning Officer, U.S. IRS. Kirstin will explain why this learning design works for hesitant adults when traditional training often doesn't.

Hosted by Phil Kirschner Phil facilitated the program and has spent more than 20 years advising leaders at McKinsey, WeWork, JLL, and Credit Suisse on how organisations adopt new ways of working.