Hidden Factor Makes AI Adoption Work
- Peter Stefanyi
- Nov 3, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Dec 16, 2025
A controlled pilot in financial services reveals the missing ingredient
Everyone's rolling out “transformative” AI tools. Most are wondering why adoption stays flat.
We ran an experiment with 137 employees at a financial institution deploying Microsoft Copilot. Two matched groups. Same self-paced training materials. But one group got something extra: four team-coaching sessions over eight weeks. Topics focused on psychological safety, peer learning, and solving real work problems collaboratively.
Eight weeks later, the differences were impossible to miss.
The Results: More Than We Expected
What happened to confidence and trust?
Without coaching: Confidence declined 6.5%. Trust in AI dropped 15%.
With coaching: Confidence rose 22%. Trust jumped 26%.
The swings: 28 percentage points on confidence (p=0.002; d=0.65). 41 percentage points on trust (p=0.001; d=0.60).
These aren't small differences. These are medium-to-large effect sizes—the kind that separate interventions that work from those that don't.
What Happened to Productivity
The coached group saved 2.27 hours per week. The training-only group saved 1.76 hours. That's a 0.51-hour weekly advantage, about 27 extra hours per year per person (p=0.001; d=0.24).
What Didn't Change: Usage Frequency
Here's the interesting part: both groups used Copilot at similar rates (p=0.143; not significant). Coaching didn't make people click more buttons. It made them use AI more effectively when it mattered.
Why These Numbers Matter Beyond This Pilot
There's a well-documented chain linking psychological safety to profit-and-loss statements. When confidence, trust, and engagement rise, business outcomes follow—predictably.
The Research Base Is Massive
Engagement: Business units in the top quartile of employee engagement deliver +23% profitability, +18% sales productivity, +14% production, and dramatic drops in absenteeism (−81%) and safety incidents (−64%).
Team trust: Reliably linked to better team performance across industries and contexts.
Confidence/self-efficacy: A strong predictor of individual work performance.
Trust in leaders: Consistent lift on performance, plus stronger effects on commitment and citizenship behaviors that drive retention and quality.
The Business Case (Conservative Estimates)
Let's run the numbers conservatively:
Coaching investment: $500 per person
Time value unlocked: ~27 hours/year × $72/hour = $1,944 per year
Net Year-1 benefit: $1,444 per person
Payback period: ~3.1 months on time savings alone
For a 100-person team: Investment: $50,000 | Annual value: $194,400 | Net 3-year value: $533,200
That's before you count the engagement-linked gains in sales, quality, safety, and retention that Gallup's research documents. Those are additional upside.
What Leaders Can Do Monday Morning
1. Pair Training with Structured Coaching
Four Colaborix coaching sessions over eight weeks reversed the confidence and trust decline and delivered measurable time savings. Training builds awareness. Coaching builds capability.
2. Track What Predicts Performance
Monitor confidence, trust, and hours saved weekly. They're early-warning signals for engagement and performance—not lagging indicators you discover in quarterly reviews.
3. Design for Psychological Safety
Make it normal to ask questions, experiment, and iterate in real work contexts. That's how feature knowledge becomes actual capability.
4. Scale What Pays Back Fast
With ~3-month payback on time savings alone, this model is economical across functions. Start with a pilot. Prove it. Then scale.
The Bottom Line
Standard training produced declining confidence and declining trust. Adding structured team coaching reversed both trends and delivered measurable productivity gains.
Training builds awareness. Colaborix AI Team Coaching builds adoption you can measure.
The question isn't whether psychological factors matter—decades of research on 2.7+ million employees settled that. The question is whether you can engineer those factors quickly enough to matter. The answer: yes.
Eight weeks. Four sessions. Measurable results.
Study Details: Controlled pilot, N=137 employees, financial services sector. Group A received standard training only. Group B received standard training plus four team coaching sessions. Statistical methods: Mann-Whitney U for ordinal scales, Welch's t-test for means, Cohen's d for effect sizes. Medium effect sizes on psychological measures (d=0.60-0.65, p<0.002), small but significant effect on efficiency (d=0.24, p=0.001).
Want to replicate these results in your organization? Contact us to discuss a controlled pilot with your teams.
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