Chapter 1, The Space Between — Author Read | Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap

Donna P. Mitchell (0:00): Welcome to Pivoting to Technology Adoption. I'm your host, Donna P. Mitchell, the Transformation Authority. Every week, I sit down with executives, strategists, and innovators to tackle the one problem no one's solving: why 70% of technology transformations fail.

Donna P. Mitchell (0:18): Let's pivot. Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap. Why billions are lost between deployment and adoption, and what the 30% do differently. Donna P. Mitchell, the Transformation Authority.

Donna P. Mitchell (0:31): For every frontline worker who knew the system wasn't working and was never asked: it was never the technology. Part One, The Gap. Chapter One, The Space Between. It was never the technology.

Donna P. Mitchell (0:51): My middle initial is P. People ask, what's it stand for? I tell them: Pivoting. It's what I've done my whole life — 49 years across five industries: telecommunications, aviation, airline, pharmaceutical, and emerging technology. One pattern followed me through every one of them.

Donna P. Mitchell (1:14): The technology always worked. The transformation rarely did. McKinsey puts the success rate of digital transformation at less than 30%. Boston Consulting Group found that only 35% reached their target value. MIT research showed that 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business impact.

Donna P. Mitchell (1:40): S&P Global reported that 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17% the year before. The numbers come from different firms studying different technologies in different years. The conclusion is the same. Most technological transformations fail. And it was never the technology.

Donna P. Mitchell (2:06): It was the gap. That gap has always been expensive. But in 2026, it can become catastrophic. Artificial intelligence is restructuring every industry simultaneously, not sequentially — the way telecom was restructured in the 1980s, then the airlines in the 1990s, then healthcare in the 2000s. All of them at once. Software companies are laying off engineers.

Donna P. Mitchell (2:36): Financial institutions are eliminating analyst positions. Healthcare systems are restructuring clinical workflows. Retail, logistics, legal, education — every sector is deploying AI tools that will fundamentally change how people work. And the organizations deploying these tools are making the same adoption mistakes I first experienced at the Bell System in 1977. Mistakes I would see repeated across every industry I touched for the next 49 years. The same mistakes, different technology, higher stakes.

Donna P. Mitchell (3:18): This book is about the gap — the space between what leadership thinks is happening and what is actually happening. Between deployment and adoption. Between the boardroom and the break room. Between the policy and the practice. Between the sermon and the walk. I've been seeing the gap for 49 years, from the ground floor of five different industries. I started at New York Telephone inside the Bell System before AT&T shattered on January 1, 1984. I spent 22 years at US Airways, progressing from reservation sales through management training, global distribution during deregulation, designing IVR systems, leading merger integration teams, and managing a $7.2 billion client portfolio. I spent 16 years at Johnson & Johnson watching healthcare make the same adoption mistakes the airline industry had already solved.

Donna P. Mitchell (4:18): And I've spent the last several years hosting the Pivoting to Technology Adoption podcast, interviewing technology leaders from around the globe who see the same patterns forming around AI. Every one of those conversations revealed different perspectives on the same gap. The most significant insight across all of them: culture change is necessary for adoption, and the people not being engaged appropriately are the real barriers, not the technology. This is a short book, deliberately. It's designed to be read in a single sitting, discussed in a team meeting, and applied the next morning.

Donna P. Mitchell (5:03): Each chapter identifies a gap where technological transformations die, and what the organizations that succeed do differently. By the time you finish, you'll see the gaps everywhere — in your organization, in your team, in your department, in your division, in yourself. That's the point. The gap has been there for decades. It's now growing faster than at any point in modern business history.

Donna P. Mitchell (5:30): And the human cost of ignoring it is no longer measured in failed software rollouts. It is measured in careers, in livelihoods, in the deterioration of society, and in the trust between organizations and the people who built them. People who invested their time, effort, energy, and loyalty to the company's mission and vision. People matter. What they know matters.

Donna P. Mitchell (5:56): Their attitude matters. Their buy-in matters. Failure to engage them matters. And right now, we are all failing at scale. Part One, The Gap.

Donna P. Mitchell (6:11): What it is. The Space Between. Chapter One, where transformations go to die. There is a moment in every technological transformation where the organization declares victory. The system goes live. It sends a company-wide email.

Donna P. Mitchell (6:30): There's sometimes a town hall. Leadership updates the board. The digital transformation is complete. This is deployment. It is a real achievement.

Donna P. Mitchell (6:40): Months or years of planning, procurement, configuration, and testing have culminated in a working system. It is also the moment when the actual transformation begins — and most organizations stop paying attention. Deployment means the technology is installed, configured, and available. Adoption means the workforce is actually using it daily, correctly, in ways that produce the intended business outcome. Their workflows have changed.

Donna P. Mitchell (7:14): Their habits have changed. Their relationship to the work has changed. Deployment and adoption are not the same thing. Deployment is an event. Adoption is a process.

Donna P. Mitchell (7:27): The distance between them is where organizations lose millions and billions of dollars every year. Allen Martinez, founder of Noble Digital and creator of the BXAI-OS framework, calls the gap the shadow ledger — the hidden liabilities accumulating in every ungoverned system. On Episode 103 of the Pivoting to Technology Adoption podcast, he put it plainly: every day your organization operates without addressing the adoption gap, the ledger grows, the liabilities compound, and by the time leadership notices, the cost of correction has multiplied. Martinez also identified three specific gaps killing AI strategy: governance, identity, and accountability.

Donna P. Mitchell (8:16): His finding that 84% of AI failures trace to leadership decisions, not technical failures, should end every conversation about whether transformation is a technology problem. The shadow ledger doesn't appear on any balance sheet, but it's there. In the workarounds nobody reports. In the shadow systems nobody authorized. In the quiet decisions being made by AI tools nobody is governing.

Donna P. Mitchell (8:48): And in 2026, with AI tools proliferating faster than any technology in history, that ledger is growing at an unprecedented rate. Deployment is the ribbon cutting. Adoption is what happens at 7 the next morning when nobody's watching. I learned the difference between deployment and adoption not from a research report, but from listening. Early in my career, I was part of a team designing interactive voice response systems for a major airline: VRU, IVR, the automated phone systems that route callers through options before connecting them to an agent.

Donna P. Mitchell (9:30): The conventional approach was to design the system based on what the organization wanted callers to do. It didn't work. Callers didn't behave the way the system assumed they would. They pressed wrong buttons. They screamed at the machine.

Donna P. Mitchell (9:47): They hung up and called back, costing the airline more money than the system was supposed to save. The approach that worked was different. We monitored thousands of actual customer calls. We listened to how people described their problems in their own language. We mapped real behavior, not assumed behavior.

Donna P. Mitchell (10:08): Then we designed call flows that matched those patterns. We revised the initial decision tree several times. We all learned as we continued the project. The result: over $31 million in cost savings — not because the technology was more advanced, but because the design started with observation, and with engaging those who knew the functionality, the capabilities of the process, and the people integrated internally and externally to the organization. For some organizations, this can have a global impact.

Donna P. Mitchell (10:39): In the airline industry, this external impact extends to cruise lines, traditional and online travel agencies, and several partners in the distribution chain. That was decades ago. The principle hasn't changed. What has changed is the speed at which organizations are deploying without observing — and the scale of consequences when they get it wrong. The gap between deployment and adoption is the foundation of everything in this book.

Donna P. Mitchell (11:09): Every chapter that follows describes a different face of this gap — a different place where the disconnect between what leadership intends and what actually happens creates cost, waste, frustration, and increasingly, human displacement. The patterns are visible. The cost is measurable. The gap is entirely preventable, if anyone is willing to look at it. That's Chapter 1 of Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap.

Donna P. Mitchell (11:42): The full book is on Amazon. Link in show notes. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Pivoting to Technology Adoption. If this episode gave you something to think about, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a colleague who needs to hear it.

Donna P. Mitchell (11:59): My new book, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap, is available now on Amazon. Visit pivotingportal.com to work with me directly. I'm Donna P. Mitchell, the Transformation Authority. Until next time — Mind the Gap.