AI Adoption Self-Check
Is your organisation's approach to AI the one that works, or the one that backfires? Five questions. Two minutes. Grounded in a field-experiment finding that rigid procedural protocols for AI use measurably reduce productivity, while cognitive reframing of AI as a 'thought partner' raises top-end quality.
What this is based on
A recent Microsoft Research field experiment (Farach, Cambon, Tankelevitch et al., April 2026) gave 388 Fortune-500 retailer employees the same AI tool and randomly assigned them one of three conditions: free-form use, behavioural scaffolding (a structured protocol telling them when and how to use AI), or cognitive scaffolding (short training that reframed AI as a thought partner rather than a tool to operate).
The headline finding: the behavioural protocol reduced document quality and substantially reduced document production. The cognitive reframing raised top-end quality. Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.08678.
This self-check maps your organisation's current pattern onto the paper's two arms. Score < 0 means you're leaning toward the shape that hurt the study; score > 0 means you're leaning toward the shape that helped. It's a framing diagnostic, not a prediction — but it tells you which direction to push.
Five questions. About two minutes. We score each answer against the behavioural-vs-cognitive axis tested in the April 2026 Microsoft Research field experiment. At the end you get a score between −10 (your pattern matches the intervention that measurably hurt productivity) and +10 (your pattern matches the intervention that helped), plus a plain-English explanation of what to do next. Answers are not stored anywhere; the calculation happens entirely in your browser.
- 1
How does your team decide WHEN to use AI?
We're asking about the rule of engagement, not the tool.
- 2
What kind of AI training have your people had?
Think about the dominant mode, not every training session you ran.
- 3
When someone uses AI and gets a bad output, what's the typical response?
The honest organisational pattern, not the stated policy.
- 4
What is your primary measure of 'using AI well'?
What actually gets reported to leadership?
- 5
How would your team complete this sentence: 'AI is ___.'
Pick the closest mental model, not the politest one.
Honest caveats: one study, one firm, one industry (retail), short-run outcome. The study's effect sizes are modest at the average and concentrated at the top of the distribution. We cite it as useful direction-of-travel evidence, not as proof. See Transition Era for the broader evidence base we're reading against.
Privacy: answers are held in your browser only — we don't log, store or submit your selections. Refreshing the page loses them. Take it as many times as you like.
Where to go next: Full piece on the study · Why UCM is the right home for AI skills · The AI Transition Era · 20-year workforce projections