---
id: "quote-managerial-signaling"
type: "quote"
source_timestamps: ["§ Adoption does not meaningfully increase."]
tags: ["adoption", "leadership"]
related: ["claim-adoption-drivers"]
speaker: "Study Participant (Manager)"
speakers: ["Study Participant"]
quote: "At the point that I saw it was becoming tied to employee success — when somebody used an LLM, they got featured at a town hall — I started telling everybody on my team, 'You've got to use this as much as you can.'"
sources: ["agentic"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-agentic"
originDay: 6
articleStem: "hbr-ext-16-dont-treat-agents-like-employees"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2026/05/research-why-you-shouldnt-treat-ai-agents-like-employees"
sourceTitle: "Research: Why You Shouldn’t Treat AI Agents Like Employees"
---
# Managerial Signaling Drives Adoption

> "At the point that I saw it was becoming tied to employee success — when somebody used an LLM, they got featured at a town hall — I started telling everybody on my team, 'You've got to use this as much as you can.'"
> — Study Participant (Manager)

Lived evidence for [[claim-adoption-drivers]] and the contrarian insight [[contrarian-humanizing-fails-adoption]]: adoption accelerates when leaders **visibly role-model** AI use and **tie it to recognition/success**, not when the technology is given a human name. It supports the augmentation-and-transparency approach echoed in the adjacent literature (see [[evidence-apa-ama-augmentation-framing]]).