Take the tool to where people already work

In late June our firm switched on Claude Tag, which puts Claude in Slack channels. Slackbot, Slack’s own AI assistant, was there too. Our people already spent their day in Slack. Putting AI there looked like an easy win.

Usage of both was poor.

The number: late June

Claude Tag went live in late June. The poor usage that followed was not the technology’s fault. It was how we used it.

What went wrong

Two things, both ours.

We never moved our skills. Everything we had built lived in Claude chat: the proposal review, the house style, the timelog skill. None of it became a Slackbot skill. So Slackbot, sitting right where people worked, couldn’t do any of the work they already used Claude for.

We didn’t like how Claude Tag reached our systems. It worked through the connectors an admin attached to the channel, with its own access, not the access of the person asking. For a firm that works inside client systems, that was the wrong way round. We wanted Claude to be able to see what the person tagging it could see, and nothing more. Anthropic has since added personal connectors in channels, so a request can run on the asker’s own access. We made the call on the version we had.

What we would do now

Before you switch a tool on, answer two questions and write the answers down. Which of the skills people already use will it carry on day one? And whose access does it use when it reaches into your systems? If the rollout team can’t answer those in a sentence each, nobody else will be able to either.

Then go further than putting the tool where people work. Put the work there too.

That was our response, and it came late. Instead of asking people to find new uses for AI in Slack, we started moving the skills they already use into Slack itself. People didn’t need a new habit. They needed the thing they already did, in the place they already were.

The lesson is simple to say and easy to miss: don’t make people come to the tool. A tool that sits somewhere people have to remember to go gets used by the people who were going to use it anyway. Everyone else needs it in their way, doing something they already know it does well. The people who do find their way to it tend to show up in the success log.

One thing to try this week

Pick one skill your team already uses every week. Ask one question: is it available in the place where that work actually starts? If the work starts in a Slack thread, an email or a meeting, and the skill lives somewhere else, that distance is your adoption problem.

Then write down, in one sentence, whose access an AI tool uses when it acts in a shared channel. If you can’t, that is the first thing to settle. It belongs on your one-page rules too.