Want Employees To Adopt AI? Give Them Time To Learn

Neal Bradbury is Chief Product Officer at Barracuda.

​The biggest obstacle to AI adoption isn’t access to the technology. It’s finding the time to learn how to use it effectively. Give an engineer an AI coding assistant without changing anything else about their workday, and experimentation has to compete with sprint commitments, meetings and deadlines.

Organizations should create dedicated time and space for employees to explore AI in a practical, low-pressure environment. Whether through hackathons, innovation sprints, workshops or focused learning days, these initiatives help employees build confidence and discover how AI can enhance their daily work.

Of course, setting aside time doesn’t automatically translate into meaningful AI adoption. Real adoption happens when experimentation is structured around meaningful business problems, supported by leadership and designed to turn individual discoveries into organizational capabilities. Based on lessons learned from a two-day AI hackathon, here are several insights organizations can use to accelerate AI adoption and turn curiosity into impact.

Start With Problems That Already Matter

Leaders shouldn’t just offer an open-ended mandate to “build something with AI.” The first step is giving employees the right problems to solve. Experimentation should be focused on a small number of business-relevant themes.

Some of the highest-value AI applications are also surprisingly mundane. They are often repetitive processes people already understand but dislike doing manually. That familiarity is an advantage because employees already know the baseline and can quickly determine whether AI improves it.

The velocity theme wasn’t just about writing code faster. It encouraged teams to examine every stage of the delivery lifecycle—from ideation and design to testing, deployment and operational handoff—and identify where AI could eliminate friction and accelerate outcomes.