Every device refresh gets a business case. Productivity improves, support costs fall, the security posture lifts, and the numbers add up well enough to get signed. Then the devices arrive, procurement closes the file, and nobody goes back to check whether any of it happened.
The gap between what the business case promised and what the organisation actually got is almost always created in the first six months after rollout. That period is where the return is either realised or quietly lost, and it’s the part of the project with the least planning attached to it.
What the first six months usually look like
- Week one is fine. New hardware, some novelty, a bit of goodwill. There’s probably a training session, generously attended because the laptop is new and everyone’s curious.
- By week three, people are behind on work and reaching for what they know. Old habits come back because old habits are fast. The new device gets used to do exactly what the old device did.
- By month three, workarounds have set. Documents move as email attachments because that’s what the team is used to. Files live on the desktop. Tickets arrive for things the device could handle by itself.
- By month six, usage has settled at a fraction of what was purchased. The AI features and collaboration tools that carried the business case are unopened. Support volumes are back to pre-refresh levels or higher, because there are now more features for people to get stuck on.
The technology is not what failed here. Every device and licence performs as specified. What failed is the assumption sitting underneath the business case: that access and capability are the same thing.
Why the rollout training session doesn’t fix it
Most organisations do try. The usual attempt is a session in the first week or two, and it’s the wrong shape for the problem in three ways.
- It arrives before the need. Staff are shown features they have no context for, then walk back to a full inbox. Retention from a single session is poor at the best of times, and rollout week is not the best of times.
- It treats everyone the same. A rates officer, a field crew supervisor and a payroll administrator have almost nothing in common in how they use a device. Generic training is the most reliable way to make people feel that training isn’t for them.
- It happens once. Tools change constantly and skills decay. A team that was confident in August is guessing again by November, and there’s nothing scheduled to catch that.
The training wasn’t wasted so much as mismatched. It was built as an event, and the problem is continuous.
Shortening the curve
Organisations that get the return their business case described tend to do four things, and none of them require more hardware.
Set a baseline before the devices arrive. Current tickets per user, the categories they fall into, and how confident staff say they are with the tools they already have. Without this you cannot tell later whether the refresh worked, and you’ll be relying on impressions in a conversation where impressions carry no weight.
Make the learning role-specific. Map the handful of tasks each role does most, then teach the device and the tools against those tasks. Relevance is what makes people turn up a second time.
Make it small and continuous. Around 15 minutes a week, reinforced by coaching, tends to outperform a full day once a year, because it keeps pace with how the tools actually change. It also fits inside a working week, which a training day does not.
Measure the same things over time. ASI’s 2025 Growth and Resiliency report frames the AI PC opportunity as “aligning device capabilities to role-specific outcomes: reducing tickets per user, improving time-to-task, and strengthening security through embedded AI features.” Those are the right three measures. Track them from your baseline and the answer to “did the refresh deliver?” becomes a number rather than an opinion.
What the same six months can look like instead
Staff resolve small issues themselves rather than raising a ticket. They use the platform they were licensed for instead of the corner of it they learned first. When the next tool arrives, they meet it with curiosity rather than dread, because change has stopped being something that happens to them.
IT gets its capacity back, measured in hours redirected from password resets to the projects that reduce next year’s demand.
This isn’t reserved for organisations with larger budgets. ASI has supported over 40,000 users through structured digital skills programmes. Spend is not what separates the organisations that get their return from the ones that don’t. What separates them is whether digital capability was planned as part of the refresh or assumed as a precondition of it.
Scoping a refresh this year? Book a 1-hour Digital Skills Workshop. We’ll help you set a baseline, work out where capability gaps will cost you most once the devices land, and build the skills plan alongside the purchase rather than after it.
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