A Simple Habit That 3x’ed AI Adoption Rates: The 15-Minute Rule ft. Cat Valverde (Enterprise AI Group)

This cuts it in half, essentially.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
All very effective stuff. What are we labeling this? What are we branding this? Is it like, like 15 minutes, 15 minute rule?

Cat Valverde:
Keep it simple.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
The 15 minute rule.

Cat Valverde:
Like 15 minutes a day, 15 minutes for the week.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
For the week, for the week. It sounds very simple. Okay. You're listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network. Most enterprise AI pilots fail because employees are overwhelmed. Kat Valverde created the 15 minute rule. 4 weeks, 15 minutes each, and she tripled adoption to 80%. In this short episode, she breaks down exactly how it works.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Joe. I'm Josh Schachter and this is Unchurned. Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of Unturned. I'm your host, Josh Schachter and I'm here for this short episode with Kat Valverde. Kat is the founder of Enterprise AI Group and we're here to talk to her about, well, what she's doing with Enterprise AI. Kat, welcome to the program.

Cat Valverde:
Thanks for having me.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, so first, you know, we want to get into a specific topic here. Before we do that, tell them a little bit about what you're doing with enterprise customers.

Cat Valverde:
Yeah, we're doing a few different things. We're a B2B solutions provider for AI businesses who are looking to get in front of enterprises or mid market buyers. And then we're also an advisory firm on the enterprise buyer side where we're helping them with best practices on how to implement AI across their teams.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
My understanding is that you are speaking intimately with a lot of enterprise stakeholders, decision makers, buyers, implementers of AI and their AI transformation. Tell us a little bit about the forums that you're in with enterprise figureheads, who the folks are that you're talking to, and then what it is that you're hearing.

Cat Valverde:
Yes. So we run roundtables every month for ourselves just to keep a hand on the pulse of the industry. And in those we have a mix of buyers and sellers. And, you know, what we're trying to do is really understand what the challenges are, what the successes are and, and create an opportunity for everybody to come together and share that in a really safe way. And what we've learned over the last year has remained steadfast on the enterprise Side, it's adoption. How can you get out of this pilot fatigue and get these things into production in a successful way? And on the seller side, of course, you know, they are focused on how can they get in front of the questions that the buyers will have. So you know, what is AI? How do you, what is roi? Excuse me, how do you really measure it? And how can the sellers make this case to the C suite, to the decision makers and really like help them alleviate their concerns or fears?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
When it comes to risk, ROI is a big one. It's a huge opportunity with agentic, but it's also something that's stifling a lot of folks right now. We're still in the early days, so you know, outcome based pricing, all that kind of stuff. I'm really eager to see where that leads. Okay, so for, for folks that are adopting AI, kinda like adoption light. So they're, they're piloting. These are large organizations, right, where they have to go through pil, pilot. I have to work with it, do it properly.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It's not just shadow AI, shadow it. What generally are the trends that you're seeing that are holding up the graduation of those pilots into larger scale implementations?

Cat Valverde:
I can really boil it down to one. If we had one KPI, we had to measure and that was it, it would be internal adoption. So what you're seeing is this huge gap between pilot and production. And at the enterprise side, you know, money isn't necessarily a problem like fighting for budget is, but holistically, you know, they have the cash to, to do these pilots. What they don't have is the time. And there's two levels of fatigue. There's the decision fatigue on finding another vendor, doing another pilot. And then all the way down there's a fatigue from the masses who are actually doing the work.

Cat Valverde:
Right. Like okay, here's another test that we have to run for another month and you know, now there's another training. Um, so you know, there's fatigue on both ends that they're having to work through and the more you do it, the less effective it is.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So there's whiplash. There's whiplash. There's so many different AI agentic tools out there, which is amazing and you know, some of the future unicorns, but also some future bubble busted companies. Right. And you're telling me that there's whiplash from the buyers and the users within that froth.

Cat Valverde:
Yeah. And you know what's so interesting is the features that we see, you know that me just a surface level, I would Say, oh, wow, this, this vendor has 10 different features, a dozen different features that I can apply to all these different work streams across teams. This is wonderful. But from the user's perspective, when it comes to training on these new pilots, it's overwhelming that it's not necessarily a good thing, because where do you start, how do you train the trainer? And then how does that trickle down in a way that makes a 30 day pilot, let's say, actually useful?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, because we're all learning together basically right now. Okay. You have a recipe for better, faster, more effective implementation. Tell us a little bit about that.

Cat Valverde:
Yeah, so, you know, everything that we're doing, we're really trying to be human focused and really understand the psychology behind, in this case, implementation, like what is actually happening. And it's easy to say, oh, it's fear. Right. I don't want AI to take my job. Which is understandable and certainly that is part of it. But it's a nice headline, right? Exactly. And I get it, you know, I think we're all living in this unknown where, you know, the other headlines we're seeing are also scary. So, you know, fair enough.

Cat Valverde:
But in reality, and even when we're doing surveys across our clients and, you know, looking to do pilots of our own, what we're actually seeing is, yes, fear is a part of it, but there's a secondary type of fear where, you know, you're fearful of asking questions, of coming across as incompetent as not understanding the training, and then of course, being overwhelmed by all of these features. And that's actually the primary driver that, that is killing adoption. It can be caused by a ton of different things right from top down, but that's really what the employees themselves are reporting to us.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It's like the fear of asking the stupid question or not being caught up to your peers. Okay, so how do we overcome that? How do we drive towards greater adoption?

Cat Valverde:
Yeah, so this is all based on having at least 30 days of an active pilot. So cut out implementation and onboarding and all of that, giving your team four weeks to, to get to know all of this so that at the end of this month you have solid data to compare against your hypothesis. Um, it's all based that at 15 minutes a week. And what you do is you start week, week one. You start by saying, listen, this is a micro commitment. Just spend 15 minutes today clicking around. Here's.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Sorry, when you say you start. This is the, the, the enterprise leader, this is the, the group leader, the team manager.

Cat Valverde:
Who is this so this is going to be, you know, you'll first roll this out to your, you know, mid layer management and it works at this level. But then what you're doing is you're training your trainer to then roll this out to the end users. So your employees on the front lines that will actually be implementing this into their workflows. Right. So you first want to make sure that you, you are rolling this out to your management team, let them try it out and then, you know, let it roll downhill.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, you say that obviously, but that may not be obvious for some folks.

Cat Valverde:
True. So, so what you do is you say, okay, week one, this is a micro commitment and you're really trying to phrasing this to the end user. This isn't forceful, this is, hey, this is a new product that we are trying out. Spend 15 minutes today or tomorrow if you can, just familiarizing yourself. It doesn't have to be anything serious. Just click around, see what it looks like, make sure it works well, it's not crashing out on you and you leave it at that. There's no additional ask, there's no follow up. It's, this is where it's at.

Cat Valverde:
Here's how you open it. Report back if you see bugs and just click around and see what things look like. 15 minutes a day, 15 minutes for the week.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
For the week, for the week. It sounds very simple. Okay?

Cat Valverde:
Yep.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay, it sounds simple, but then again so does, you know, it sounds simple and small, but then again like doing my monthly expense reports also does and sometimes like don't find the 15 minutes for that. Right, but okay, so 15 minutes a week just to open whatever Agentic AI application you're using and just click a bunch of buttons, right. And learn and have questions to bring back. Okay, and so that's week one. Now what do we do in week two?

Cat Valverde:
So in week two you are moving into what we call the choice architecture. So again, this isn't a forcing function. You want to keep autonomy really clear and you're asking each individual, hey, just pick a feature. And this goes back to what I was saying, how, you know, many features can be very overwhelming. We're saying just pick one that looks interesting and again, spend 15 minutes for this week just digging into it, click around, see what it's all about, make sure it works well, report bugs back to us and you know, keeping it really light. And again you leave it at that. And then the following week is when they're going to be reporting back on their findings.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And so week two again is just 15 minutes. 15 minutes for week one, 15 minutes of playing around for week two. We can all do it. Okay, bring us into week three.

Cat Valverde:
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, you're halfway through at this point, two of the four weeks, and what you're really trying to do is build momentum. And whenever you do this in small increments, that's what you're doing is they've already started. Um, and so if you can get them to actually start, then you're much more likely to get them to build on that. So on week three, you are then in team meetings, team slack, whatever makes sense based on the department. You are asking for volunteers to give a 32nd, 62nd, you know, shout out to whatever feature they tried and you know, explaining like, oh, did you know it did this? Or oh, I learned this. Just a really quick understanding that they clicked around and here's what they learned. And what you're seeing there is social proof, which is not that surprising for how humans work.

Cat Valverde:
If you see people talking about something that they found interesting, you're much more likely to check it out yourself to provide your own feedback. And that's really what this is all about. So you do that as many times as come up organically throughout that week, but at least get a handful of people to report on what they found.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It almost. And then that's it. And then you just kind of rinse and repeat.

Cat Valverde:
Right? That's it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So, so it almost feels to me like you're, you're building like a nesting program, like back to like the call center days. You're, you're building like a cohort to just take one, one discrete workflow task, use case at a time and together learn like, and then just go and have a quick little half hour seminar and talk through it or whatever that time of that meeting is.

Cat Valverde:
And then, yeah, right, that's really, that's really it. And, and by the time you get to week four, that's when you do make an ask. You still really focus on autonomy and letting them choose their own adventure. But what you're saying is, okay, whatever feature you picked, you know, now apply that to some sort of a real world task and we see this as a differentiator from what typical rollouts are and that usually it's okay, we're adding this to our workflow or here's a new piece of our stack and we need to integrate it. But that is intangible and overwhelming and nobody really knows what that means by asking them to do something specific like, hey, use this New feature to summarize a client call or use this to make a call on emails with this keyword or you know, whatever is most useful and aligns with the features that they chose. Again, it's still only, you know, about 15 minutes, maybe even less. But they're seeing it in the real world. And what you're also doing is guaranteeing that they are adopting it in some way.

Cat Valverde:
So you're also getting data it to how it's actually working.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you're, you're guaranteeing adoption or you're, you're stacking the cards by making this more digestible and snackable, reducing cognitive load, creating a little bit of social proofing and peer pressure if you want to call it. And then I had an old business school professor that would call it creating more proximate objectives, more like short term smaller objectives rather than just a larger thing. And, and as you were talking I recalled that you have a master's in psychology. So.

Cat Valverde:
Yes. So I thank you for, for, for the upgrade. Still studying on this one. But yeah, it's all in organizational psychology. And no surprise, that's exactly what this is all focused on is human behavior. And really borrowing from those playbooks and focused on productivity psychology.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. One of my favorite business books, the Power of Habit.

Cat Valverde:
I'm sure, I'm sure that's exactly right. It's, it's forming habits, it's building momentum. And what I think is really interesting about this when it comes to training a department, let's say because you're letting them have the autonomy on what interests them, you know, that alone is incentive to, you know, dig around into what individuals find interesting. But then you're also creating different pockets of understanding across the teams. So if someone is learning a different feature and they remember, oh, you know, so and so talked about this in the meeting. I know they know how to use it. I'm going to go ask them. You've now also created this kind of group training program that is collaborative.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I love it. I love everything about it. It's so simple. Okay, so let's give this some credibility. Like does this really work at a, at a, at a real enterprise? Does it work at a thousand person company, a 10,000 person company? What have you seen as far as wins and outcomes?

Cat Valverde:
Yeah, so we did a, you know, post mortem on a group of 200 employees. So, so it was 50 leaders and then 200 employees. 250 for the survey. And what we saw when they implemented this was, you know, 2 to 3x in adoption increases. So previously they were seeing 20 to 30% adoption, afterwards they were seeing 60 to 80%. And it was a mix of enterprises and mid market. We do have some SMBs as well that this works on. Obviously it's a smaller sample size so you know, you can extrapolate from there, but you know, the bigger the better.

Cat Valverde:
And the data shows that really. And from there you can extrapolate all kinds of other KPIs. You know, we're seeing on average enterprises spend what I think it's like a thousand dollars on average per user per year on training. This cuts it in half essentially per user per year. So that's, you know, $500 savings. You know, obviously the efficiency that you're building in to time savings per user, which was the whole point theoretically on adopting the AI to begin with. And then ideally, you know, it all boils down to a successful pilot that then you can push into production.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
All very effective stuff. What are we labeling this? What are we branding? This is it like 15 minute, 15 minute rule.

Cat Valverde:
Keep it simple.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
The 15 minute rule. Like 5 minute abs. The 15 minute rule. Okay, Kat, where can folks reach you if they'd like to follow up?

Cat Valverde:
Thank you. Yes, you can find me on LinkedIn. Kat Valverde. I think I'm the only one, but you can subscribe to our daily newsletter at enterpriseaisolutions IO or, or you can email me directly at catais IO.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Thank you for being on the program.

Cat Valverde:
Thanks Josh.