The Noise Problem

America has a gift for taking anything with mass-market potential and marketing it until it’s unrecognizable. Something real gets buried under so much hype that people stop listening. AI is deep in that cycle right now. Every product is “AI-powered.” Every ad promises transformation. Most of it is noise making AI workflow adoption more challenging.

But underneath that noise, the way we interact with computers is fundamentally shifting. Within five years, nothing about how we use technology will look the same. I barely type anymore. I talk to my computer now, and it talks back, and the work gets done.

The marketing has made it nearly impossible for people to hear that without flinching. When you show up with a real AI workflow that actually works, you’re fighting through a wall of justified skepticism before you even get to the good part.

The Click and What Comes After

There’s a moment in adopting AI tools where things click. You start thinking in terms of what’s possible, and suddenly your workflow gets faster. The harder part comes next: getting someone else comfortable with it.

Maybe it’s a client. Maybe it’s a collaborator. Maybe it’s your boss. You’ve built something that works, a process, a tool, a faster way of doing things, and now you have to bring them into it without making them feel left behind.

My instinct is to show what I built. The architecture, the logic, the capability. I get excited. I want them to see what I see. So I open the hood and start pointing at the engine, and they just wanted to know if the car could go faster. They’re encountering it for the first time, and it looks like a lot, because it is a lot. If their first experience feels like drowning, their next instinct is to go back to the old way, even if it’s slower.

The Overwhelm Mistake

I made this mistake recently, more than once. A client was genuinely excited about what AI could do for our project together. The energy was there, the curiosity was there, and I took that as permission to hand them everything.

I built what I’d call a sandbox for our AI workflow adoption, a full working environment with research, references, keywords, and structure, all organized and ready to go. It was the whole kitchen. Every ingredient, every tool, every recipe, laid out on the counter at once. They took one look at it and wanted to go back to the old way.

So I walked it back. Not the work, the visibility of the work. The sandbox still exists, and the system still runs. But now the client sees one finished concept at a time. Something they can hold, react to, and say yes or no.

From those reactions, I learn what resonates, refine the next round, and the work gets better and faster without them ever needing to understand the machinery behind it. You start by handing them one small thing to digest. Then two. Then a few options side by side. Over time, their comfort grows, their vocabulary for talking about the work expands, and you can gradually widen the aperture. Eventually they’re collaborating inside a process they didn’t even realize they learned.

Don’t Kill the Potential

When my client pulled back, my instinct wasn’t to abandon the approach. It was to repackage it for AI workflow adoption. What’s sitting inside that sandbox, the speed, the depth of research, the ability to generate and iterate at a pace that didn’t exist two years ago , that’s the seed of a business model that’s never existed before. A way of developing work that changes what a client can receive, how fast they can receive it, and how deeply it can reflect what they actually want.

That potential doesn’t disappear because someone got overwhelmed on day one. You just have to let them find it at their own pace, one finished piece at a time, until they look up and realize they’re working in a way that didn’t used to be possible and they don’t want to go back.

They’ll learn AI by trusting you.