🧩 Why “Just Try It” Is Bad AI Advice
Encouraging people to “just try AI” sounds empowering. It signals openness, curiosity, and speed. But in practice, this advice often creates confusion, anxiety, and uneven results. What feels like freedom to leaders frequently feels like exposure to everyone else. ------------- Context ------------- When AI enters an organization, the most common starting message is simple: experiment. Explore. Play. The intent is positive. Leaders want to avoid rigidity and spark discovery. They want momentum without bureaucracy. What follows, however, is rarely true experimentation. People try different tools in isolation. They duplicate effort. They encounter inconsistent results. Some get quick wins, others get burned. Most quietly disengage. The problem is not experimentation itself. The problem is unstructured experimentation in environments where outcomes still matter. When expectations are unclear and norms are undefined, “just try it” becomes a liability, not an invitation. AI adoption fails less often from resistance and more often from overload. ------------- Experimentation Without Structure Increases Cognitive Load ------------- Trying something new requires mental energy. When people are told to “just try AI,” they are implicitly asked to choose tools, invent use cases, judge output quality, manage risk, and decide what is acceptable to share. That is a lot to ask on top of existing workloads. Instead of curiosity, people feel pressure. Instead of play, they feel evaluation. They wonder if they are choosing the right tool, using it correctly, or wasting time. Every decision carries uncertainty. Cognitive load accumulates quietly. When it gets too high, people retreat to familiar workflows. Not because they dislike AI, but because they cannot afford the extra thinking. This is why adoption often clusters around a few enthusiasts. They absorb the load. Everyone else watches. ------------- Tool Sprawl Is the Enemy of Learning ------------- Unstructured experimentation almost always leads to tool sprawl.