Building AI Confidence in a Growing Professional Services Firm

The Challenge

A London-based professional services firm with 65 employees had recently introduced an AI-assisted document review tool across their operations team. The tool had been selected and implemented by the IT function, with a brief all-staff email announcing the change and a link to the vendor's training materials.

Three months later, adoption was well below expectations. A significant proportion of the operations team were not using the tool at all. Those who were using it were doing so inconsistently, often reverting to manual processes for anything they considered important. Two experienced team members had raised formal concerns about the accuracy of AI-generated outputs and their own accountability if errors went undetected.

The HR Director recognised that the problem was not the technology. The tool was working as intended. The problem was that the people side of the implementation had been almost entirely overlooked.

She reached out to AdaptivHR.

What We Did

We began with a structured listening exercise: a combination of an anonymous survey across the full team and a series of small-group conversations with employees at different levels and in different functions. The goal was to understand not just what people thought about the specific tool, but how they felt about AI more broadly and what was driving the resistance.

What we found was not unusual. Anxiety about job security was present but not dominant. The bigger issues were a lack of clarity about what the tool was actually supposed to do, a genuine concern about professional accountability when AI was involved in work that carried client risk, and a feeling among many employees that the change had been done to them rather than with them.

We presented these findings to the HR Director and the senior leadership team, along with a clear set of recommendations. The recommendations covered four areas: communication and transparency, manager capability, a revised onboarding approach for the tool, and an updated AI policy that addressed the accountability questions employees had raised.

Over the following eight weeks, we worked alongside the HR Director to implement each recommendation. We facilitated a series of team sessions where leaders explained the rationale for the tool, answered questions honestly, and acknowledged that the initial rollout had not given people enough support. We ran a half-day workshop for people managers on how to support their teams through AI adoption and how to handle the accountability questions that were coming up in one-to-ones.

We worked with the HR and Legal teams to update the AI policy to include clear guidance on human oversight and professional responsibility. And we redesigned the onboarding process for new users of the tool to include a practical, role-specific session rather than a link to vendor documentation.

The Outcome

Four months after we began working together, adoption of the AI tool had increased significantly across the operations team. The two formal concerns that had been raised were resolved through the updated policy and a direct conversation with the employees involved. In the HR Director's words: "The technology was never the issue. Once people understood what it was for, felt heard about their concerns, and had clear guidance on their own responsibilities, they got on with it."

The firm subsequently asked us to support the rollout of a second AI tool in their client services function, this time with the people strategy built in from the start rather than added after the fact.

What This Engagement Included

• AI Readiness Employee Engagement Survey
• Leadership team presentation and recommendations session
• Manager workshop: supporting your team through AI adoption
• AI policy review and update
• Revised tool onboarding process design
• Ongoing HR Director support throughout implementation

"AdaptivHR helped us see that we had a people problem, not a technology problem. Once we understood that, the path forward was much clearer."