You're Measuring AI Adoption. You Should Be Measuring AI Abandonment
CIO.com, Friday, October 9th, 2026
License and prompt counts hide value; tracking who abandons AI tools reveals where workflows break.
AI adoption dashboards count licenses, activated seats and prompts, but they measure distribution rather than value, and the metrics are usually defined by vendors.
With only 31% of leaders expecting to measure generative AI ROI in the next six months, the author argues that abandonment, meaning who tried a tool, how quickly they stopped and where it failed, is the signal employees produce themselves.
Different abandonment patterns need different fixes, and on a 1,000-seat deal, 20% never adopting plus 20% dropping off wastes 400 licenses.