Boston Consulting Group surveyed over 10,000 employees across 11 countries, and their findings reveal why some companies are winning with AI while others struggle.

It's not about having better AI tools or being first to adopt. The companies seeing real results from AI are investing in their people, not just their technology.

What Successful Companies Do Differently

BCG's research makes the pattern clear. Companies seeing real value from AI share three characteristics:

1. They treat AI adoption as a people challenge, not a technology challenge
They don't assume that rolling out tools will drive behavior change. They invest in training, coaching, and support that build skills and judgment.

2. They provide substantially more training and support
59% of companies that reshape workflows provide 5+ hours of training vs. 40% at deploy-only companies—those that simply roll out AI tools without redesigning work or building employee capability. Successful companies also provide 23% more leadership support. This is a fundamentally different approach to workforce development that recognizes coaching and personalized support as essential.

3. They make strategic guidance available to everyone, not just leadership
They close the 25% gap between leadership adoption (76%) and frontline adoption (51%) by ensuring every employee has access to the coaching that drives results. They have workforces with better judgment, stronger skills, and the ability to create value that compounds over time.

The Training & Coaching Advantage

BCG identified three critical components of effective AI training:

• Volume: At least 5 hours of training (79% adoption vs. 67% with less)
• Format: Interactive sessions (84% adoption vs. 70% without)
• Support: Access to coaching (89% adoption vs. 70% without)

Coaching access increases AI adoption by 19%—more than any other single factor.

The impact goes beyond adoption rates. Employees with coaching support develop judgment. These users know when to use AI vs. when to rely on their own expertise. They can evaluate AI output critically. They understand which tasks benefit from AI assistance and which don't. They know when to override AI suggestions based on domain knowledge.

The Problem: Coaching Doesn't Scale

Basic AI training—how to write prompts, which tools to use, technical features—can be delivered through standard methods. Strategic coaching is different. It's the personalized guidance on applying AI to your specific role: when to use it vs. when not to, how to evaluate outputs critically, how to balance efficiency with quality in your actual work context.

To deliver BCG's coaching-supported approach, an organization would need to supplement their standard training with:

• 1+ hour of personalized strategic coaching per employee = 300+ coaching hours
• Ongoing support as employees apply skills = additional hundreds of hours
• Customization for different roles and contexts = even more complexity

With traditional coaching approaches: This is impossible. Your L&D team can't provide thousands of hours of one-on-one coaching. External coaches are prohibitively expensive at this scale. And group coaching sessions dilute the personalization that makes coaching effective.

The typical compromise: Maybe you offer "office hours" that 5% of employees attend. Maybe leadership coaches their direct reports, but frontline employees get a webinar. Maybe you provide great training to priority roles and hope it trickles down.

With this approach, only 51% of frontline employees adopt AI, compared to 76% of leaders and managers. You're leaving half your workforce—and half your AI investment—unrealized.

Making Strategic Coaching Available at Scale

Most companies provide basic training on AI tools, like webinars on prompt engineering, tutorials on features, and technical documentation.

But these resources often don’t answer the most common employee questions like:

• When should I use AI?
• How do I apply it to my specific challenges?
• When do I trust the output vs. verify more carefully?
• When does AI help my work, and when does it get in the way?

This is where coaching makes the difference. Instead of choosing between coaching that doesn't scale and training that only covers the basics, AI-powered coaching platforms supplement standard training and make personalized, strategic guidance available to every employee.

Here's what this looks like in practice:

A sales manager has completed basic AI training and knows how to use the tools. Now they open Colleva and enter a coaching scenario: "How do I use AI to prepare for a client meeting without losing my personal touch?" The platform guides them through their actual use case and provides feedback as they practice their approach. They iterate 3-4 times, seeing where their prompts work well and where they miss important context. By the end of 30 minutes, they've built practical judgment about when AI helps and when it gets in the way.

This is fundamentally different from learning how to use AI tools. The employee is working through their own strategic challenges, making decisions about when and how to apply AI, receiving specific feedback on those decisions, and refining their judgment through repetition.

Colleva's Learning & Development solution provides these interactive coaching scenarios and topic walkthroughs that employees can access anytime, building the judgment and strategic decision-making skills that BCG's research shows drive results.

Critically, it's also available to all employees—not just leadership, not just priority roles, not just the handful who can attend office hours.

The impact:

• Frontline employees get the same quality of strategic coaching that executives receive
• Every role gets coaching on how to apply AI to their specific work context
• Employees build strategic judgment at their own pace without scheduling constraints
• L&D teams can support thousands of employees without burning out
• Human coaches can focus their time on complex, high-value interactions

This is what separates companies that deploy AI from companies that reshape work with AI. It's the difference between hoping employees figure out how to apply AI strategically and systematically building that capability across your organization.

From Higher Adoption to Better Decisions

Investing in coaching-supported AI training can help you create a workforce that:

• Knows when to use AI strategically vs. when human expertise is critical
• Evaluates AI output with trained judgment, catching errors and oversimplifications
• Redirects time savings toward high-value work instead of just being "faster at everything"
• Makes better decisions by combining AI capabilities with domain knowledge
• Continuously improves as AI tools evolve

The math on this matters:
300 employees × 1 hour/day saved × 250 work days = 75,000 hours/year

• At 51% adoption: 38,250 hours reclaimed
• At 80% adoption: 60,000 hours reclaimed
• Difference: 21,750 additional hours available for strategic work

That's the real ROI of getting AI training right, and it compounds over time as skills deepen and organizational capability builds.

Learn more about how Colleva's Learning & Development solution makes personalized AI coaching available to every employee—or request a demo to see how coaching at scale can close your AI adoption gap.