AI Won’t Stick Unless the Behavior Does
by Claire Brady, EdD
If you're not already following NYU’s Conor Grennan on LinkedIn, you're missing out on one of the most practical, thought-provoking voices in the AI and leadership space. His AI newsletter cuts through the noise—smart, clear, and refreshingly human.
Conor hits the nail on the head in a recent AI Mindset newsletter: AI adoption isn’t stalling because people lack access—it’s stalling because we’re treating a behavioral challenge like a software rollout. I’ve seen this firsthand working with higher ed leaders across the U.S. The tools are there. The licenses are purchased. The excitement from the implementation teams is palpable. And yet? Usage is minimal. ROI is fuzzy. And faculty and staff often default back to the same old workflows, barely scratching the surface of what’s possible.
Why? Because we’ve been going about it backwards.
We showcase shiny success stories from other campuses or industries. We assign an “AI champion” in each department and hope it sticks. We circulate a deck of institutional use cases and think that will unlock magic. And we roll out ChatGPT Enterprise or Microsoft Copilot, assuming people will just use it.
But as Conor brilliantly puts it: access is not adoption. And enthusiasm is not habit.
The institutions making real progress are the ones that stop thinking of AI as “tech to deploy” and start treating it as a daily behavior to build.
Here’s what that looks like in higher education:
We stop asking, “What can AI do for us?” and start asking, “What are the most time-consuming, people-draining, or repetitive parts of our work?”
We help staff and faculty see AI not as a cheat code—but as a co-worker that drafts, suggests, and supports.
We teach people to dialogue with AI, not just command it.
And we normalize that using AI well isn’t about mastering prompts—it’s about engaging curiously and consistently, with the work you’re already doing.
Want your advising team to use AI? Don’t start with a pilot project or a policy. Start by sitting beside them while they write outreach emails, plan events, or build student advising plans—and show how a few small prompts can unlock big time savings.
Change behavior, not just tools.
If you’re leading AI efforts at your institution, this is the lens to adopt. This is the shift to make. And this is the conversation worth having—not about what AI can do, but how we help our people build the muscle to actually use it.
