Most Teams Treat AI Like Google — That's the Real Problem | Intel Hub

Key Takeaway

Connor Grennan, Chief AI Architect at NYU Stern, draws a hard line between people who 'use AI' and people who actually use it: most teams treat it like Google — a few queries a week — while power users run it as a companion across 30+ daily interactions with long, iterative conversations that redesign how work gets done. That behavioral gap is the real adoption problem, and Grennan argues current AI — no further advances needed — can already eliminate 25% of entry-level white-collar roles, meaning organizations running shallow adoption are sitting on massive unrealized efficiency.

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Our Take— Mike Sanders, Founder

“This confirms what we see in every deployment across healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing alike: the bottleneck is never the AI tool itself — it's the gap between having access and actually redesigning the process around it. Organizations that treat adoption as 'we gave everyone licenses' instead of 'we rebuilt the workflow' are leaving 15-25% labor cost reductions on the table.”

Most Teams Treat AI Like Google — That's the Real Problem

Connor Grennan, Chief AI Architect at NYU Stern, draws a hard line between people who 'use AI' and people who actually use it: most teams treat it like Google — a few queries a week — while power users run it as a companion across 30+ daily interactions with long, iterative conversations that redesign how work gets done. That behavioral gap is the real adoption problem, and Grennan argues current AI — no further advances needed — can already eliminate 25% of entry-level white-collar roles, meaning organizations running shallow adoption are sitting on massive unrealized efficiency.

From the Source

"A power user is using it across everything from home to work and back again and also are having long conversations because this is not Google. This is a companion."

— How to Make AI Your Strategic Partner in 40 Minutes | Conor Grennan

Key Takeaways

01Grennan frames AI adoption as behavioral, not technical — his 'AI Mindset' framework trains organizations on how to think differently, not just how to use features
02Power users treat AI as a companion across home and work with long conversations and 30+ daily interactions — casual users fire off a few queries a week like a search engine
03Current AI capability — frozen at today's level — can already wipe out 25% of entry-level white-collar jobs, which means the urgency isn't about future tech but present behavior
04Stop chasing new tools dropping daily — Grennan's advice is to map your existing workflows first and apply AI as a process redesign tool, not a productivity add-on
05Reinventing a process gets noticed more than just doing more work — the payoff comes from rethinking the workflow, not from speeding up the old one