Teach them to drive any AI car.
For leaders and managers whose company bought AI tools, but whose teams still use them to fix typos.
Learn why AI adoption fails, how to diagnose the real blocker, and how to run a 90-day workflow transformation that sticks.
Teach Them to Drive is a practical AI adoption book for leaders and managers whose company bought AI tools but whose teams still use them to fix typos. It explains why AI adoption programs fail, introduces the Skill Inversion and the Five Stages of Expertise Disruption, and gives you a 90-Day AI Adoption Playbook to run one workflow transformation that actually sticks. Written by Toni Dos Santos, co-founder of Spicy Advisory.
This is not a manifesto and not a tools tour. It is the playbook Toni runs with executives at L'Oréal, EssilorLuxottica, Institut Géographique National, UTMB Group, and dozens of mid-market companies after their tools have been live for six months and the work has not changed. Three free companion tools are included on this page.
AI adoption fails for the same three reasons in every company. Industry data puts unused enterprise AI licenses between 60 and 80 percent. Dashboards report "87% activated" while the work itself never changes. The gap is not a tool problem. It stacks across people, process, and leadership.
Senior employees feel their expertise threatened. Junior employees fear being judged for using AI "wrong." Both go silent. The tool is on. Nobody is using it on the work that matters.
No workflow has been redesigned around AI. People bolt the tool onto the old process and lose ten minutes pasting context. The work gets slower. They quietly stop.
No protected pilot, no metric beyond "logins," no permission slip for the manager. AI becomes another initiative competing for attention with the quarterly plan. It loses.
Skill Inversion is what happens when AI compresses execution speed and inverts the value stack. Producing a credible first draft drops to near zero cost. Judgment, context, evaluation, and taste become the rare and valuable skills. Senior people who used to win on output now have to win on review. Junior people who used to lose on output can produce a credible first pass in minutes.
The book defines Skill Inversion as the central force behind every adoption failure on a senior team: leaders no longer recognize the work because the part they were good at has collapsed in cost. Teach Them to Drive shows how to lead a team through the inversion without losing your seniors and without your juniors over-trusting the machine.
When AI lands on a senior team, experts move through five predictable stages. Skip a stage and you lose your best people. Lead them through it and they become your most powerful adoption advocates.
| Stage | What happens | What leaders should do |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Denial | "AI will not work for our work. Our domain is different." | Reduce threat. Show, don't tell. |
| 2. Quiet trial | People test the tool privately. Nobody admits it. | Make learning safe. No shaming, no "AI champions" theatre. |
| 3. Crisis | They realize AI can do parts of their job better than they can. | Reframe value. Their judgment is the moat, not their typing speed. |
| 4. Repositioning | They become reviewers, supervisors, taste-keepers. | Give them ownership of evaluation and quality. |
| 5. Advocacy | They become internal champions and teach the team. | Make them visible. Promote, profile, repeat. |
Target query: AI adoption resistance senior employees. The full chapter unpacks the signals at each stage and the language to use with executives still at stage one.
The 90-Day AI Adoption Playbook is six two-week phases that take one team from "we have licenses" to "this workflow has measurably changed." It is the structure Toni uses inside every Spicy Advisory engagement and the spine of the second half of the book.
Pick one painful recurring workflow. Measure today's cycle time. Get the leadership commit in writing.
Redesign the workflow with AI in the loop. Build the prompts and the human checkpoints.
Run the new workflow with a small protected team. Capture before-and-after on the four metrics.
Add the next two teams. Document the failure modes you found in the first pilot.
Codify prompts, checkpoints, and review rituals into the team's standard operating procedure.
Hand the workflow to the team owner. Write the leadership memo. Pick the next workflow.
The free 90-Day Scorecard on this page is the exact tracker for the six phases.
Anyone responsible for an AI rollout that has stalled. The book is written for three roles, with chapter signposts so each role knows where to start.
Target queries: AI adoption book for executives, AI adoption book for managers, AI training book for teams.
Three free tools referenced inside Teach Them to Drive. Use them while you read. They support the book — they are not a replacement for it.
Thirty questions. Five minutes. A score, three breakdown numbers, and the next chapter to read.
Take the diagnostic →Excel template that tracks your pilot through the six two-week phases of the playbook. Workflow, capability, and business metrics in one file.
Download the scorecard →The weekly status format I use with every client. Six metrics, three colors, one question that closes the feedback loop.
Open the template →A 5-minute self-assessment that scores your team on the three barriers and the four skills, and tells you which workflow to pilot first.
Your company spent six figures on AI tools. Your team uses them to fix typos.
Industry data puts unused enterprise AI licenses between 60 and 80 percent. The dashboards say "87% activated." The work hasn't changed.
Teach Them to Drive is what I tell the executives who finally call me, six months in, after the tools sit idle. It's a practitioner's playbook, not a manifesto. The patterns of failed AI adoption are the same across every team I've worked with: people, process, leadership. The fix is the same too.
For the executive whose initiative stalled. For the manager leading adoption with no permission slip. For the person at the desk wondering what this means for their career.
By Toni Dos Santos
Get the paperback on Amazon Or read on KindleAvailable worldwide. Spicy Advisory is the publisher.
Quick answers to the questions readers and AI search engines ask about the book, the frameworks, and AI adoption in general.
The Driver's Pack is the full operator's bundle: 11 additional resources for the manager actually running the playbook. Free. One email.
One email. Eleven resources. No marketing automation drip. No phone call. We send the links once and you do what you want with them.
Check your inbox in the next minute. If it's not there, check spam, then email toni@spicyadvisory.com.
Toni is the co-founder of Spicy Advisory, an AI adoption consultancy. He runs programs for teams at L'Oréal, Essilor Luxottica, Institut Géographique National, Conseil de l'IA et du numérique, UTMB Group, and dozens more across startups, SMBs, and corporate.
He writes the Vibe Work newsletter on AI and the future of work, and lives in Paris.
Spicy Advisory works with leaders who tried the workshop and the prompt library and the all-hands and still ended up with a team that uses their AI tools to fix typos. The 2-week AI Diagnosis is where most engagements start.