Companies that hesitate to adopt artificial intelligence risk falling so far behind faster-moving competitors that the gap may become impossible to close, according to Neil Cawse, founder and CEO of fleet-management firm Geotab. In a first-person account of his company's rollout, Cawse argues that the transition to AI is already underway and that leaders who treat it as a distant project are effectively choosing to lose ground.
Geotab's approach was to move quickly rather than wait for a polished plan. The company deployed a custom AI tool called GIA to all 3,400 employees in a single day, giving both technical and non-technical teams access to a secure gateway with pre-loaded skills from their laptops. Within seven days, Cawse said, the company recorded a 97% daily active rate. The decision to put the tool in employees' hands immediately, rather than designing what he called a perfect rollout, was deliberate: he believed the company would learn more and move further ahead by starting fast.
Cawse described the shift as one of the hardest changes he has led at Geotab, because it requires rethinking how the business operates, how teams are organized and how leaders measure performance. Avoiding that disruption, he wrote, is a decision to fall behind. He offered six lessons from the rollout, beginning with the idea that leaders must adopt the technology themselves before asking employees to embrace it. Using AI personally, he said, allows executives to speak honestly about what it can do, where it falls short and how it can improve work.
The second lesson concerns simplicity. Onboarding is the highest-friction point in any technology rollout, so Geotab made the first step as easy as typing «GIA» to begin. The easier it was to start, the faster employees moved from uncertainty to experimentation. Third, Cawse stressed clear and continuous communication: leaders should share concrete examples, celebrate useful experiments and create opportunities for employees to learn from one another. Geotab holds monthly town halls where staff describe how they use AI, and Cawse led a hackathon with more than 2,000 participants to build skills and discover new ways of working.
Cawse also urged companies to measure output rather than usage. Log-ins, prompts and token counts are easy to track, but they do not show whether teams are delivering more value with the same resources. Geotab makes usage information, including token consumption, available to all employees immediately, a transparency measure he said encourages responsible and purposeful adoption. His fifth lesson is the need for guardrails covering privacy, security, data protection and human judgment. Employees must know what information can be used, which outputs require review and when human expertise must take over. Sensible boundaries, he argued, make innovation safer without making it impossible.
Finally, Cawse advised companies to act before they feel ready. Waiting for AI adoption to feel neat and comfortable is the biggest mistake leaders can make, he wrote, because the process is inherently messy. The first version will be imperfect, and rapid implementation is not optional when the technology is moving at lightning speed. Firms that adopt AI now, he concluded, will outpace competitors and build the confidence, skills and adaptability needed for a rapidly changing future.