There’s a metric every CIO and CFO should fear- the number of empty seats.
Empty seats on a flight.
Empty rooms in a hotel.
Unused M365 Copilot/ ChatGPT licenses across your company.
Because every empty seat is a sunk cost in days of lost productivity that can never be recovered.
The Illusion of ROI
When companies talk about “AI ROI,” they talk in broad strokes.
Investment. Efficiency. Cost reduction.
But real ROI is not theoretical. It’s daily. It’s multiplied by time.
You can’t say “We have invested in AI” if there are NO passengers flying on the plane.
Every single day a M365 Copilot/ChatGPT/Gemini license sits unused is a day of lost value you can’t get back.
The longer the asset sits idle, the lower its lifetime yield.
The Real Bottleneck
Last week at the Microsoft AI Tour in Toronto, I sat in a roundtable with CIOs and senior executives.
One Leader from the manufacturing sector said something that stayed with me:
“If AI can help automate our ‘XYZ’ process, it would change everything.
That’s where months are lost; that’s our biggest bottleneck. That will help us get ahead of competitors.”
Notice what he didn’t say.
He didn’t talk about AI models, tokens, or licenses.
He talked about the one process that defines his company’s value chain.
That’s what vision looks like.
Because ROI doesn’t come from licenses.
It comes from clarity - from knowing exactly where AI should land in your business to unlock time, speed, or accuracy.
The Empty Room Analogy
Think of it this way: You own a hotel with 200 rooms.
Every night, the rooms that sit empty are revenue gone forever.
You can’t make it up tomorrow.
The same is true for AI. If your Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, or Gemini licenses sit idle, that day is wasted.
ROI isn’t measured in capability; it’s measured in daily activation.
The number of rooms × the number of days.
So if you have 1,000 seats at $30/ per month and only 80 seats are used, that’s $27,600 of monthly value evaporating.
That’s a costly illusion of progress :)
The Behavior Pattern: Persuasion → Incentive → Compulsion
AI adoption doesn’t start with software.
It starts with human behavior and people and their habits don’t change overnight.
To help them use the tools you give them, you need to move through three stages:
1️⃣ Persuasion - Help them understand why.
Persuasion is led by leadership storytelling.
Before people use something new, they need to see how it connects to their world.
Don’t lead with features. Lead with pain points. Start with “problems.”
Show them how AI can take away the tasks that are slowing them down and eating up their time - the boring reports, the endless formatting, and the copy-pasting between systems.
Tell stories that make it real:
“Here’s how finance cut two hours from every report.”
“Here’s how HR stopped drowning in onboarding emails.”
When they see it helping someone like them, it stops being “a tool” and starts being useful.
2️⃣ Incentive — Make it worth their while.
Once they understand why, they’ll ask:
“Okay, what’s in it for me if I use it?”
This is where you connect AI usage to things people already care about - speed, recognition, or performance goals.
Show them that using AI isn’t extra work.
Maybe you highlight top users in a town hall.
Maybe you measure how AI use reduces turnaround time.
Whatever you do, make progress visible.
When people see that effort pays off, usage follows naturally.
3️⃣ Compulsion - Make it impossible to ignore.
If the above 2 don’t work, then you have to resort to compulsion.
Compulsion is enforced by IT integration.
This is when AI stops being “something extra” and becomes part of how work gets done.
Set norms:
For example:
Every meeting summary is generated by AI.
Every dashboard is summarized by AI.
At that point, AI isn’t optional - it’s operational.
The State of AI Adoption
Here’s the truth that CIOs quietly admitted at that roundtable at the Microsoft AI Tour.
No one has nailed AI adoption.
Not fully. Not yet.
There are, of course, companies that have.
They’re treating it as intellectual property.
Because turning AI from experiment to execution is now a competitive advantage.
They’ve realized this isn’t about tech stacks. It’s about culture, incentives, and leadership.
Until organizations evolve how they decide, measure, and lead,
AI will remain a fascinating experiment that never scales.
My Story
When I started the AI adoption process with our HR, Legal, and Finance teams, it taught me that AI adoption starts with retraining the mind.
The turning point wasn’t when we rolled out Microsoft Copilot.
It was when we actually trained employees on how they can use prompts with Copilot to do their day-to-day work.
We stopped saying “try this new AI feature.”
We started saying: “Let’s see how you’d do this faster & better with Copilot.”
Small language change.
Massive behavioral shift.
The Call to CIOs
If you’re giving away AI seats without activation plans,
you are NOT scaling innovation - you are subsidizing waste.
That may sound harsh, but it’s the truth every CFO already sees in the numbers.
Every empty seat, every unused license, every ignored feature- that’s ROI dying quietly in the corner.
Let’s talk about the rooms that stay empty in your org.
Let’s figure out how to fill them - every day.
The future belongs to those who get ROI from every single seat, every single day of the year.
About the Author
I’m Priya Tahiliani, and I’ve spent the last 15 years at the intersection of HR and Technology. Most of my career has focused on SAP HCM and SAP SuccessFactors consulting, working with Big Four firms and clients across the globe.
I built and launched my company’s first AI tool by forging a great partnership with IT, and today I continue to work with HR leaders to help shape the future of work with AI.
Beyond work, I serve as Vice President of Public Relations at Toastmasters. I’m also the Founder of the AI Collective – Oakville Chapter in Canada, part of the world’s largest community for AI professionals - a network dedicated to learning and leading responsibly with AI.
And of course, I write the AI Lady newsletter, where I share my experiences, insights, and thoughts about how AI is reshaping our workplaces.