Damian Nomura

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Most of the friction in AI adoption isn't the technology. It is the 'first-mile' problem.

I saw this play out last week with a team trying to automate their lead research. They had the prompts. They had the API keys. They had the vision.

But they were asking their reps to leave their CRM to use it.

That is the first-mile problem. The moment you ask a human to change their tab, you have already lost half the adoption. The tool becomes a destination rather than an environment.

We spent the afternoon moving the logic into the interface they already live in. No new login. No new workflow. Just a new button where the old manual work used to be.

The result wasn't just faster work. It was that the work actually happened.

If you are building an internal AI tool, stop looking at the capabilities for a second. Look at the distance between the user's current cursor and your 'Start' button.

If that distance is more than one click, you are building a shelf-ware product.

I'm writing more about the 'Adoption Autopsy' series on my Substack this Friday. It is about the small design choices that kill big projects.

Link in the comments.

What is the one tool in your stack that you love, simply because you never have to 'go' to it?

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