You’re measuring AI adoption. You should be measuring AI abandonment

CIOs should shift AI governance from vanity adoption metrics—licenses, logins, and prompt counts—to abandonment and retention, which more accurately reveal whether tools are creating durable business value. The strategic implication is that IT organizations need to measure where AI workflows break down, distinguish between never-adopted, tried-and-dropped, and decaying usage, and use that signal to reallocate spend, improve fit, and avoid scaling tools that only look successful in dashboards.