Recently, our CEO Bianca Ritchi was a guest at MSP Late Night, a round table for and about MSP leaders. Episode 9 covered a topic that occupies us daily: adoption. Not adoption in the legal sense, but the question of how you ensure that software you roll out actually gets used. And more than that: how you change behaviour rather than simply implementing technology.
Seated at the table were four people each bringing their own perspective: Michiel Willemsen (CEO of Adoptify), Anouk ter Harmsel (co-founder and COO of Guardey), Hans (partner manager at Corsair), and Bianca. Later, Tom van Gelder joined as well, an MSP director who deals with the hard reality of adoption every day. A sharp combination of practice, policy, and behaviour.
Adoption doesn’t start after implementation, it starts before
One of the most powerful points of the evening came up early: if you only address adoption after the software has been rolled out, you are already too late. Michiel put it well. Adoption should not be a closing note in an implementation project, but the starting point. The question “how is this organisation actually going to use this?” needs to be asked before a single licence has been purchased.
Bianca recognised this immediately from her daily work at Let’s Copilot. Organisations buy Copilot, switch it on, and wait. No change in behaviour, no results, no usage. Buying the licence is the easy part. Getting people to do their work differently, that is where things get interesting.
The business model around adoption is broken
One statement that stuck: the business model around adoption is fundamentally flawed. Clients know that adoption matters; they all nod along approvingly. But when you ask them to open their wallets, they are nowhere to be found. The costs of onboarding and adoption programmes are quickly seen as something to cut.
This has consequences. MSPs themselves stop putting adoption front and centre. Sales sells a licence, and a separate adoption team sorts it out afterwards. But that way, adoption becomes someone else’s problem. And if an adoption specialist does exist within an MSP, they burn out quickly because they are sent to every client with an impossible brief.
The solution, as the table agreed, lies in reshaping incentives. Bianca put it sharply: “Tell me the incentive and I’ll give you the result.” If a salesperson is only rewarded for selling licences, their responsibility ends the moment the contract is signed. But what if sales also had a target tied to usage? Activation rate after 90 days, repeat usage after six months. Then adoption becomes a shared interest rather than a standalone department.
Clients use just 20 percent of what they pay for
A concrete figure that sharpened the conversation: most organisations use only a fraction of the functionality they subscribe to. Microsoft 365 contains over 40 tools, but the average SME touches no more than five. That is not a lack of ambition, it is a lack of guidance, policy, and context.
Anouk pointed out that security works exactly the same way. You can give people a platform, but if nobody understands why it is relevant or how it fits into their daily work, it simply collects dust. Guardey addresses this by deliberately making security awareness engaging, in the style of Duolingo. Because behavioural change only works when people are intrinsically motivated, not when it is a dull mandatory training.
AI and adoption: the next challenge
The evening also touched on AI tools such as Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT. Bianca raised a familiar risk: employees use all kinds of tools, but the policies and frameworks that should accompany them lag behind. Organisations face a choice: do you facilitate this properly, or do you end up creating shadow IT?
Adoption with AI tools is not a technical question. It is about people understanding what they can and cannot enter, why certain choices have been made, and how to use the tools smartly for their specific work. That requires an ongoing programme, not a one-time training session.
What we take away
For us as a company, this evening confirmed something we have felt for a while: adoption is not an add-on. It is the core of what we do. A licence that goes unused has no value. Changing behaviour is harder than implementing technology, but it is precisely where the difference is made for the client.
Bianca shared afterwards that she found the conversations at the table inspiring, but also a confirmation that there is still a long road ahead. Awareness is growing, but practice lags behind. That makes the work more urgent than ever.
