The Parable of the Ghost Town (Why AI Pilots Fail)
The code was perfect. The data was clean. So why is nobody using it?
Let me tell you a story that you may be able to relate to.
Let’s call it “The Parable of the Ghost Town.”
It begins on a Friday afternoon at a fictional company called “LogisticsCo.”
The office smells of burnt coffee and victory.
The IT team has just hit Deploy on their big project. Someone pops a bottle of champagne. Screens glow with dashboards and graphs. Fists bump. Backs are slapped.
They’ve done everything by the book.
They validated the strategy.
They cleaned the data.
They built a beautiful internal tool that can answer any question about shipping routes in seconds.
On paper, it’s supposed to save the team 10,000 hours a year.
Everyone goes home feeling like heroes.
The Silence
A week later, the Head of Operations logs in to see how the new tool is doing.
He expects the chart to look like a rocket launch.
Instead, he gets a flatline.
Usage: almost zero.
He blinks. Refreshes the page. Same result.
He walks onto the floor to investigate. He sees his team working exactly the way they always had.
Nothing has changed.
People are still squinting at PDFs.
Still shouting questions across desks.
Still stitching together answers from spreadsheets and memory.
The “game-changing” tool is sitting there, untouched.
It is a digital ghost town.
He pulls aside one of his best managers. The kind of person who usually adopts new things early.
“We built you the ultimate tool,” he says quietly. “Why aren’t you using it?”
She glances around and lowers her voice.
“I tried it once,” she admits. “I just stared at the screen. I didn’t even know where to start or what to ask. And if I’m honest… if I get too good at this thing, what happens to my job?”
The “Anxious Middle”
LogisticsCo solved the Technical Problem, but they ignored the Human Problem.
In Chapter 4 of my book, AI First, I write: “AI is only as good as the teams that build and deploy it” .
When you drop a new AI tool on a team without preparation, you don’t trigger excitement. You trigger fear.
This is the “Anxious Middle.” They aren’t Luddites.They’re not anti-technology. They’re not protesting in the car park. They’re showing up, doing their jobs, and quietly worrying:
“What if I ask a ‘stupid’ question?”
“What if this proves a machine can do my job better?”
“What if I press the wrong button and break something?”
So they do the safest thing they know.
They ignore it.
How to Fix the Ghost Town
You don’t fix fear with a launch email or a PDF manual.
You fix it with small, repeatable habits.
That’s why we built Readie Streaks into the Readie platform. We realised you can’t force people to adopt new tools; you have to coach them into a new way of working.
Instead of dropping a “game-changer” on Monday and hoping for the best, you guide them with tiny daily actions:
Day 1: A 2-minute reflection on a task they secretly hate.
Day 2: A quick, practical prompt they can copy-paste into their assistant.
Day 3: A short, personalised quiz that shows them a win.
No jargon. No overwhelm. Just small, safe experiments that build confidence.
You build “AI fitness” the same way you build muscle:
Not with one heroic workout, but with consistent reps.
Your Move
If your AI adoption is stalling, the problem probably isn’t the tool.
It’s the culture around it.
Open your 5-Chapter Book Preview and go to Page 69 (Chapter 4: People & Culture). You’ll find a step-by-step outline for bringing employees into the process early—so they feel like pilots of the technology, not passengers waiting to be replaced.
Because the real risk isn’t that the tool fails.
It’s that it works beautifully
…in a town no one ever visits.
To your readiness,
Davies Bamigboye, Hon.Phd