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- Caroline Mercer via Fast Company
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Geotab CEO Says Companies That Delay AI Adoption Risk Falling Behind
ReGeotab CEO Says Companies That Delay AI Adoption Risk Falling Behind
Geotab founder and CEO Neil Cawse argues that companies waiting to adopt artificial intelligence will fall behind competitors, sharing lessons from rolling out a custom AI tool to 3,400 employees in a single day.
Companies that hesitate to adopt artificial intelligence risk falling so far behind competitors that the gap may become impossible to close, according to Neil Cawse, founder and CEO of Geotab. In a first-person account, Cawse said the transition to AI has been one of the hardest changes he has led at the telematics company, reshaping how people work, how teams are organized, and how leaders measure performance.
Cawse rejected the idea that every company will survive the shift. Firms that learn to use AI, he wrote, will move faster, make better decisions, and produce more with the same resources. Those that wait, by contrast, will create a competitive gap that may prove too wide to close. Avoiding the disruption, in his view, is effectively a decision to fall behind.
Geotab's approach was to move quickly rather than wait for a perfect plan. The company rolled out a custom AI tool called GIA to 3,400 employees in one day, giving both technical and non-technical teams full access to a secure AI gateway with pre-loaded skills from their laptops. Within seven days, the company recorded a 97% daily active rate.
Cawse said the decision to put GIA at employees' fingertips immediately, rather than designing an ideal rollout, was deliberate. He believed the company would learn more and get further ahead by starting fast. The experience produced six lessons for getting employees on board with AI.
The first is that leaders must be the first adopters. Cawse argued that executives cannot ask employees to embrace a technology they have not taken the time to understand themselves. Using AI personally, he said, helps him speak honestly about what it can do, where it falls short, and how it can improve work.
The second lesson is to make the first step simple. Onboarding is the highest-friction point in any technology rollout, and if the first experience is too complicated, many people will not get far enough to discover the value. At Geotab, employees could simply type «GIA» and begin, which helped them move faster from uncertainty to experimentation.
Third, leaders need to communicate clearly and continuously. Cawse said companies should share concrete examples, celebrate useful experiments, and create opportunities for employees to learn from one another. Geotab's monthly town halls give employees a chance to hear about and share how they are using AI, and Cawse led a hackathon with more than 2,000 participants to build skills and discover new ways of working.
Fourth, companies should measure output rather than usage. Cawse noted that AI usage is not the same as business value, and it is easy to track log-ins, prompts, tokens, or the number of employees who opened a tool. The real question is whether teams are delivering more value with the same resources. Geotab makes usage information, including token consumption, available to all employees immediately, which Cawse said encourages responsible and purposeful adoption.
Fifth, adoption requires guardrails. Privacy, security, data protection, and human judgment must be built into any rollout, but Cawse argued that guardrails should make innovation safer rather than impossible. Employees need to know what information can be used, what outputs must be reviewed, and when human expertise must take over. The companies that succeed, he wrote, will understand the risk and establish sensible boundaries while continuing to learn.
Finally, Cawse urged leaders to act before they feel ready. The biggest mistake, he said, is waiting for AI adoption to feel neat and comfortable. The process is messy, and the first version will be imperfect. With technology moving at lightning speed, rapid implementation is not optional. Companies adopting AI now, he concluded, will outpace competitors and build the confidence, skills, and adaptability needed for a rapidly transforming future.
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