The 95% pilot-failure rate is real, and it’s not a tool problem. Pilots fail at the Reinforce stage — the tool got bought, training got delivered, and three months later the team was back to spreadsheets. Pilot That Sticks is built for that exact failure mode: a baseline, a champion, the ADKAR sequence, a day-60 adoption review, and a 10% outcome bonus that we only collect if usage actually sticks.
We shadow the workflow. Interview 4–6 people. Map the current process. Identify the gaps. The COM-B model tells us exactly where adoption will break — Capability, Opportunity, or Motivation. Most failed AI rollouts throw training at a Motivation problem or build a fancy interface for a Capability problem. We diagnose the right one before designing anything
We define the pilot scope, set the success metric, establish the baseline, and identify your internal champion. Design of Experiments discipline says you can’t claim a result without a baseline. Implementation Science says interventions must be defined before they’re implemented — or you’ll never know what worked. Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations tells us exactly who to pick as the champion.
We re-tool the workflow so the AI option is the path of least resistance. Remove copy-paste friction. Update SOPs. Place the tool inside the system your team already uses. Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge established that defaults shape behavior more reliably than mandates. If using the AI tool requires a separate tab and pasted context — adoption will collapse.
Cohort training. Weekly check-ins. Adoption metrics posted where the team can see them. ADKAR’s Knowledge and Ability stages define what training actually has to accomplish — not just exposure but practice under realistic conditions. Visible cohort metrics borrow from Cialdini’s social proof, one of the strongest drivers of behavior change.
Manager reinforcement scripts. Small-wins celebrations. Make the old way harder to access. Day-60 adoption review. This is the stage 95% of competitors skip — and exactly where most pilots collapse. ADKAR’s fifth stage and Kotter’s sixth step both name this moment. The Heath brothers call it “shrink the change.” We call it the most important 30 days of the engagement.
Hand-off to the Adoption Coach retainer. Monthly adoption metrics. Quarterly nudge experiments. Kotter’s eighth step — anchoring change in the culture — recognizes that change reverts unless it becomes how things are done here. Without sustained reinforcement, day-60 adoption rates drift back toward zero by day 180.
Each stage is rooted in established research — Michie’s COM-B, Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations, Thaler & Sunstein’s Nudge, Prosci’s ADKAR, Kotter’s 8 Steps, the Heath brothers’ Switch. We don’t invent the science. We sequence it correctly and measure the result.
You’re an owner or decision maker who’s already tried an AI tool and watched it quietly fade — or you’ve just finished an AI Readiness assessment (ours or someone else’s) and you want to run a real pilot, not another demo. You don’t want a slide deck. You want a 90-day engagement that produces measurable workflow change and weekly active usage by day 60.
The 10% outcome bonus is collected only if weekly active usage is at least 70% on day 60. Most consultancies will not put their fee on the line like that. We will, because we’ve designed the engagement to hit that bar — and if we can’t, we shouldn’t get the bonus.
If the day-60 review shows zero adoption, we refund 25% and stop the engagement. No “let’s try harder for the next 30 days.” If the methodology hasn’t produced measurable usage by day 60, we walk.
Pilot That Sticks is a pilot — not a multi-year platform contract, an IT infrastructure overhaul, or a custom AI model training engagement. If the pilot succeeds and you want to scale, we’ll either continue with you on the Adoption Coach retainer or hand off cleanly to your internal team.
