AI adoption: can too many possibilities delay first use?
A team can have access to AI yet spend considerable time browsing the catalogue of possible uses. Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ programme “Leading AI adoption in your team”, this raises a specific management question: should fewer options be presented to facilitate a relevant first use?
What the literature establishes
Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper (2000, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) showed across several experiments that a larger choice could attract more interest without encouraging action. Depending on the setting studied, a smaller set of options favoured outcomes including purchasing or motivation to complete a task. These findings distinguish two objectives that are often conflated: attracting interest in an offering and enabling people to act on it.
An effect that depends on the situation
Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Peter M. Todd (2010, Journal of Consumer Research) re-examined choice overload in a meta-analysis. They found an average effect close to zero, alongside substantial variation between studies. Their finding rules out treating the number of options as a general cause of disengagement.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that the whole team should be required to use a single tool and a few standardised prompts. That would confuse a hypothesis about how choices are presented with a prescription for organising work. A simplified starting point can be tested while retaining access to other possibilities when the task warrants them. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot decide
These studies do not address generative AI adoption within teams and establish no optimal number of tools or prompt templates. At work, hesitation may also indicate an ill-defined task, a confidentiality restriction or the absence of a suitable option. Counting catalogue openings alone cannot distinguish between these explanations.
A practical check in Sion
In Sion, a team working in hydropower, healthcare, viticulture or Alpine tourism could compare two entry points to the same approved resources over two weeks: the full catalogue and a task-specific selection that retains access to the rest of the catalogue. For comparable tasks using public or fictional documents and involving no safety or clinical decisions, randomly assign the presentation and measure the time from its display to the first relevant prompt, using criteria defined in advance. Also record instances of abandonment and assess output quality using the same evaluation rubric for both presentations. A selection that shortens this interval without reducing quality provides local grounds for simplifying the entry point, not for removing other possibilities. To go further: explore the Leading AI Adoption in Your Team training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Leading AI Adoption in Your Team in Sion
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