Geotab Put Custom AI in Front of 3,400 Employees in One Day

Geotab deployed a custom AI tool, GIA, to all 3,400 of its employees in a single day — and within seven days it recorded a 97% daily active rate. Neil Cawse, founder and CEO of the fleet-data company, laid out the rollout and its lessons in a first-person account, arguing that speed beat a polished launch plan.

Cawse's warning is blunt: companies that wait on AI may never catch up. "Companies that learn how to use AI will move faster, make better decisions, and produce more with the same resources," he wrote. "Those that wait will create a gap with competitors so wide that it may become impossible to close."

He did not soften the internal cost either. "The transition has been one of the hardest changes I've led at Geotab," Cawse wrote, noting that it changed how people work, how teams are organized, and how leaders measure performance. His conclusion: "Avoiding that disruption is a decision to fall behind."

How did the one-day rollout work?

Every employee, technical or not, received full access to a secure AI gateway with pre-loaded skills straight from their laptops. There was no lengthy pilot phase. Cawse said he believed Geotab would "learn more and get further ahead by putting GIA at people's fingertips immediately rather than designing a perfect rollout."

The friction point, in his telling, was onboarding — the moment most technology rollouts lose people. Geotab's answer was to make the first step trivial: employees could simply type "GIA" and begin. The easier the start, the faster people moved from uncertainty to experimentation.

What are the six lessons?

Cawse distilled the rollout into six operating rules:

• Be the first adopter. Leaders cannot ask employees to embrace a technology they have not taken the time to understand themselves. Cawse tests new tools personally so he can speak honestly about what AI does well and where it falls short.
• Make the first step simple. Complicated onboarding stops people before they discover value.
• Communicate clearly and continuously. Geotab's monthly town halls let employees share how they use AI. Cawse also led a hackathon with over 2,000 participants to build skills.
• Measure output, not usage. Log-ins, prompts and token counts are not business value. The real question: are teams delivering more with the same resources?
• Set up guardrails. Adoption requires privacy, security, data protection and human judgment. Employees must know what information can be used, what outputs need review, and when human expertise takes over.
• Do it before you feel ready. "The biggest mistake leaders can make is waiting for AI adoption to feel neat and comfortable," Cawse wrote.

What about transparency on usage?

One detail stands out against common corporate practice. Geotab makes usage information available to all employees immediately, including token consumption. Cawse's logic: transparency helps people understand how they use AI and encourages responsible, purposeful adoption.

The stance on metrics is equally direct. It is easy to count who opened the tool. It is harder, and more important, to verify that teams produce more value with unchanged resources — the test Cawse says actually matters.

Why does speed matter more than polish?

Cawse framed the choice as asymmetric. Rapid implementation is not optional "with technology moving at lightning speed," he wrote. Let the first version be imperfect; the messy start buys the learning that a delayed, polished one never delivers.

His closing argument: the companies adopting AI now will outpace competitors and build the confidence, skills and adaptability a quickly transforming future demands. For Cawse, the risk calculus is settled — the only decision left is whether leaders accept it before the gap widens.