AI Adoption Glossary

The organizational and individual work of putting generative AI into productive use. Distinct from AI implementation (the technical work of deploying tools) — adoption focuses on people, processes, and the cultural shifts that determine whether deployed tools actually get used.

• → AI Adoption Scaffold
• → Why AI Pilots Fail

AdoptionLab.AI's five-phase framework for building lasting outcome-delivery capability: Explore, Experiment, Extend, Embed, re-Envision. Adapted from Prosci change management and Lean Six Sigma practice for the specific shape of generative AI adoption.

• → The AI Adoption Scaffold (full article)
• → Engagements

A 6 to 8 week engagement focused on moving an AI initiative from "shipped" to "actually used." Includes stakeholder analysis, communication strategy, resistance planning, role-based enablement, and reinforcement metrics.

• → Engagements

A 4 to 6 week discovery engagement that identifies, validates, and prioritizes AI use cases. Produces a prioritized backlog of 10 to 20 candidate use cases plus 3 to 5 implementation-ready briefs for the highest-value opportunities.

• → Engagements

An 8 week, end-to-end AI pilot engagement from discovery through working solution. Includes stakeholder interviews, enablement workshops, hands-on coaching, build-ready BRDs, change management support, and a documented case study.

• → Engagements

A 4 to 6 week engagement that produces a draft AI policy framework — red lines and approved use, employee guidelines, customer disclosure templates, and a communication plan. Facilitative, not legal: final policy must be reviewed and approved by legal counsel and applicable governance bodies.

• → AI Policy Template (article)
• → Engagements

A personalized AI advisor included with GenAI Belt memberships. Provides 1:1 guidance applying belt concepts to your specific role, organization, and challenges. Sessions are 30 minutes each.

• → Practice Tools

A 15-question diagnostic across five dimensions — AI literacy, prompting, workflow integration, evaluation, and change leadership — that produces a personalized GenAI Belt recommendation, dimension-by-dimension breakdown, and a clear next step. Free.

• → Take the assessment

An AI-powered career coaching tool included with GenAI Black Belt and Master Black Belt. Builds a Master Career Profile through structured interview, generates tailored resumes, runs mock interviews, and explores career paths with real salary data.

• → Practice Tools

The discipline of helping people, teams, and organizations move from a current state to a desired future state. Outcome delivery in the GenAI moment is fundamentally a change management challenge — the technology is rarely why pilots fail. AdoptionLab.AI methodology is rooted in Prosci, PMP, and Lean Six Sigma practice adapted for AI.

An AI-powered tool included with GenAI Green Belt and above. Helps managers prepare for difficult conversations — performance issues, team conflict, delivering bad news, compensation discussions — through structured prep and guided reflection.

• → Practice Tools

The fourth phase of the AI Adoption Scaffold. Building AI into how work gets done so it survives the loss of the original champion. The signal that you have embedded is when AI usage shows up in standard process documentation and onboarding, not in a special project plan.

AdoptionLab.AI's project-based outcome-delivery work for small and mid-market leaders. Defined scope, defined deliverables, transparent pricing — senior expertise without the firms-above-you price tag. See the Engagements page for the full catalog.

• → Engagements

The second phase of the AI Adoption Scaffold. Running structured pilots with documented hypotheses, methods, results, and recommendations. Distinct from "demo" — an experiment has a falsifiable hypothesis with a population, intervention, metric, baseline, and time horizon.

The first phase of the AI Adoption Scaffold. Mapping the landscape: where does AI plausibly create value, what is the team's current relationship with AI, what data exists, what regulatory and competitive context applies. Produces a baseline and a candidate use case inventory.

The third phase of the AI Adoption Scaffold. Scaling what worked in Phase 2 across additional teams. The phase where most AI adoption efforts quietly die — extending requires different muscles than experimenting and is a process problem, not a communication problem.

An ongoing partnership in which AdoptionLab.AI provides senior AI leadership inside the partner organization on a monthly retainer (10 to 15 hours per month, 3-month minimum). Embedded support across strategy, prioritization, governance, and team capability building, with the explicit goal of developing an internal successor so the partner team can run with it. Often paired with GenAI Belts to build the capability of the team.

• → Engagements

AdoptionLab.AI's structured outcome-delivery development program: White Belt, Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt, Master Black Belt. Each belt builds applied capability through outcome-based development rather than awareness-only training. Modeled on martial arts progression and Lean Six Sigma certification structure.

• → GenAI Belts

The fourth belt level. AI Adoption Manager certification — for directors and senior managers actively running or overseeing AI initiatives, focused on scaling proven pilots from one team to an entire department.

• → Black Belt

The third belt level. AI Facilitator certification — for directors, managers, and team leads being asked to lead AI initiatives. Forty hours over eight weeks; participants design and run a real AI pilot inside their own organization using Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles.

• → Green Belt

The fifth and highest belt level. AI Transformation Architect certification — for senior leaders, operations executives, and dedicated AI transformation roles responsible for outcome delivery at the whole-organization or multi-department level.

• → Master Black Belt

The first belt level. AI Foundations — three hours, self-paced, $39 introductory price. Covers what AI is, how it works in plain terms, and where it fits into day-to-day work. Built for non-technical professionals.

• → White Belt

The second belt level. AI Practitioner — twenty hours, self-paced. For individual contributors and emerging leaders who want to move from AI awareness to delivering measurable outcomes within their team.

• → Yellow Belt

A free, 3 to 5 minute organizational self-assessment that maps where a company stands across the AI Adoption Scaffold and produces a 90-day executive action plan with phase-specific priorities, recommended belt certifications, and a quick-win list.

• → Take the Navigator

For AdoptionLab.AI purposes, organizations with roughly 50 to 500 employees. Big enough to feel real AI pressure, small enough to be ignored by Fortune 500–focused consulting firms. The "missing middle" that AdoptionLab.AI is built to serve.

A physical or hybrid space designed to help teams explore AI on their own time. Includes prompted brainstorming artifacts, walk-through guides, and curated tool stations. Delivered as an add-on to a sprint. Client provides the technology and on-site technical support; AdoptionLab.AI designs the systems, content, sandbox environments, and walk-through experience.

• → Engagements

AdoptionLab.AI's positioning frame. The work of moving an organization or individual toward measurable outcomes — using change management, continuous improvement, and GenAI as one toolkit. Distinct from "AI adoption," which centers the technology rather than the outcome the technology is in service of.

• → Engagements
• → GenAI Belts

A four-step cycle from quality improvement practice — Plan a small test, Do the test, Study the results, Act on what was learned. Forty years old and trusted across healthcare, manufacturing, and education. Used in the GenAI Green Belt program as the discipline for running structured AI pilots.

A facilitated, on-site one-day team event where employees learn to use AI on real work problems. Includes pre-work scoping, the day itself, and follow-up debrief and planning sessions that convert outputs into next steps. Best as a kickoff to a larger engagement.

• → The Promptathon Playbook
• → Engagements

A change management methodology and certification, widely used across enterprise change practice. AdoptionLab.AI's methodology is rooted in Prosci practice (founder Matt Humer is a Prosci Certified Change Practitioner) adapted specifically for the shape of outcome delivery in the GenAI moment.

The fifth phase of the AI Adoption Scaffold. Using what the organization has learned about AI to redesign strategy and structure. Not a project — a posture. The companies that pull ahead are the ones that treat embedded AI as a starting point for new strategy, not a finish line.

See "Mid-Market." AdoptionLab.AI primarily serves organizations with 50 to 500 employees, plus smaller organizations whose AI ambitions match the work. The common thread is companies without enterprise-scale staff or budget but with real GenAI pressure.