The Xbox Problem

This week I sat across from three sales leaders at a technology company doing north of thirty billion a year. Their CEO compares AI to the internet and says the company is not moving fast enough. The budget behind that belief is enormous. Every seller has a Claude license and a serious token allowance.

And the sharpest question in the room was this: “What are we not even thinking of?”

That question tells you everything. The money is spent. The tools are live. And the team still does not know what the gift is for.

Here is the thing nobody is saying out loud: an AI budget is not an AI capability.

My grandson is six months old. If I gave him an Xbox for Christmas, I am sure he would appreciate what it is going to do for him. Not yet, right? The gift is real. The gift is even the right gift. He just cannot open it.

That is what most enterprise AI spend looks like right now. Companies in a token economy handing out tremendous token budgets to people who have never been shown where the on switch is.

The standard fix is a course. A library of videos. A lunch-and-learn. I spent almost a year of my life building exactly that kind of AI sales training, and I will give you the number the industry will not: ten percent. One in ten people came back a week later and said this changed how I work. The other nine watched, nodded, and went back to doing things the old way.

Watch-and-learn is not keyboard.

Adoption happens when someone with operator experience stands over your shoulder, gets your hands on the keys, and makes you do the thing on your own real work. Log out of your account and show me how you get back to the project we built. Basic? Completely. Skipped? Almost always.

Here is a five-second test you can run today. Open your AI tool and look at the custom instructions field, the thing the model reads before every single request you make. In most accounts I look at, that field is empty. One sales pro I work with keeps his company’s values card on his keychain. Every principle his company operates by, printed in his pocket, and invisible to the tool he uses every day. That card is code. It belongs inside the machine.

The pattern is the same at every level. The budget exists. The intent is real. The behavior never changed.

And the payoff for changing it is not subtle. My world these days is spent waiting on meetings. I do not have any more prep to do. You could give me all the time in the world. I am already ready. That is not a talent. That is a system, and it is available to any team willing to put in thirty days of actual behavior change.

So if your company bought the licenses, sent the courses, and adoption still looks like a dim bulb, you do not have a tool problem. You have an Xbox problem. The gift is sitting there wrapped.

If that sounds like your team, reply to this email and tell me what you bought and what actually changed. I read every reply, and I will tell you straight whether the gap is the tool or the behavior.

Wade Kerzie

Founder, Kerzie AI Solutions