From Testing to Enterprise Wide Adoption: How to Adopt GenAI Effectively
Last year the phrase ‘there’s an app for that’ was replaced with ‘you can use GenAI for that’. Generative AI (GenAI) has been taking business by storm across industries. Organizations have gone from talking about the new technology to adopting it, often skipping the stages in between. But, as with all new technologies (aren’t people still trying to optimize cloud deployments?) adoption doesn’t equal benefits.
For most businesses embarking on their GenAI journey, moving from proof of concept to production is a critical hurdle. While you may have or might be considering a proof of concept (POC), statistics show that as many as 70% of POCs get stuck and never make it to production. This raises an important question: how do you ensure your GenAI initiatives don’t just show promise in testing, but deliver real value across your enterprise? How do you move beyond the experimental phase to realize the true benefits of GenAI—whether that’s boosting efficiency, launching products more quickly, or enabling smarter data analytics—without getting bogged down in endless trials or development cycles?
This blog looks at how to adopt GenAI effectively, how to put it into practice and how to speed up your time to impact.
Accelerating GenAI impact: from value to enterprise scale
Before embarking on your GenAI adoption journey, it’s crucial to understand both your ‘why’ and your ‘how’. Your organization’s motivation for adoption might be to boost revenue, increase productivity, or become more agile and responsive to market demands. Each business and departments within each business may have different goals; customer service focused organizations might be looking to streamline the way they handle customer inquiries, respond to issues or generally connect with their market, while professional services organizations, for example, may want to improve and automate business processes such as billing or payroll.
But, understanding these objectives is only half the equation. Equally important is identifying and implementing the right tools and frameworks that will enable confident, full-scale adoption across your enterprise. This includes tools for data-driven decision making, trend analysis, and generating actionable intelligence—capabilities that can benefit any organization, regardless of sector.
Choosing the right tools
The journey to enterprise-wide GenAI adoption involves two critical tooling decisions. First, organizations must carefully select the GenAI tools that align with their business objectives. This means evaluating not just functionality, but how these tools handle, store, and share data. Questions about data retention, model training practices, and security protocols become paramount—especially when dealing with sensitive company information or customer data.
However, selecting your GenAI tools is only half of the equation. Equally crucial is choosing the right platform to manage and optimize your GenAI investment. This management layer helps organizations monitor usage patterns, detect potential risks, ensure compliance, and measure ROI across the enterprise. Without proper oversight tools, organizations risk losing visibility into how AI is being used, where sensitive data might be exposed, and whether their GenAI investment is delivering the intended value. The right management platform transforms GenAI from a powerful but potentially risky technology into a secure, measurable asset that can be confidently scaled across the organization.
GenAI tool detection and visibility
On the subject of tools, GenAI tool detection and visibility across the enterprise is an equally important part of your successful adoption process. Organizations need to be able to flag unsanctioned use of potentially good tools that they can put under management or risky ones they need to block.
This visibility into GenAI tool usage across the enterprise serves two crucial purposes: it helps identify valuable tools that employees are already successfully using—which could be brought under corporate management and scaled more widely—while also revealing potentially risky applications that need to be restricted. Without this detection capability, organizations operate blind to shadow AI use, missing opportunities to formalize beneficial tools while remaining exposed to security and compliance risks from unauthorized platforms.
Real-time detection becomes the cornerstone of effective GenAI governance, enabling organizations to make informed decisions about which tools to embrace and which to restrict.
GenAI risk management frameworks
Once you’ve selected your GenAI tools, establishing comprehensive frameworks for management, usage policies, and enforcement should be a top priority in your adoption strategy. These frameworks need to be in place before implementing any AI governance platform—after all, you need to know what policies you’re enforcing before you can enforce them.
The key is creating clear, actionable guidelines that protect your organization while enabling innovation. This means defining not just what tools can be used, but how they should be used, what data can be shared, and what oversight is required. Your risk management framework should address everything from data handling protocols to approval processes for new use cases.
Remember that changing employee behavior takes time—research suggests a minimum of 18 days to form new habits. This is why consistent reinforcement of GenAI policies is crucial. Regular reminders and clear guidance help minimize the risk of costly mistakes that could impact your organization’s bottom line or reputation. The goal isn’t to restrict innovation, but to channel it safely and productively through approved pathways.
Real-time data and insights
A successful GenAI adoption journey requires continuous assessment and refinement—and this process must be driven by data, not intuition. Real-time analytics of enterprise-wide GenAI usage provides the visibility needed to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and where adjustments are needed.
Rather than relying on educated guesses to evolve your frameworks and policies, leverage value-driven GenAI insights to guide your decision-making. This data-first approach minimizes the time spent on trial and error, allowing you to fine-tune your GenAI strategy with precision. By monitoring usage patterns, adoption rates, and impact metrics in real-time, you can accelerate your organization’s time to value and ensure you stay on track to maximize the benefits of this transformative technology.
Supply chain visibility
While establishing robust internal policies and monitoring employee usage is critical, your GenAI governance strategy must extend beyond your organization’s walls. Supply chain visibility becomes paramount as your third-party relationships can significantly impact your AI risk profile.
GenAI supply chain governance isn’t just about compliance—it’s about creating a secure ecosystem where your policies are understood and respected by all partners. From preventing data corruption to guarding against security vulnerabilities and unauthorized AI usage, ensuring your supply chain adheres to your GenAI protocols is essential. This alignment builds trust and eliminates potential blind spots that could compromise your adoption journey. After all, your AI governance is only as strong as your weakest link—whether that’s internal or within your broader network of partners and suppliers.
Deploying GenAI systems securely with Portal26
When it comes to GenAI adoption, deriving business value and supercharging investment, it’s clear businesses have a lot more to consider – especially around usage. Are we deploying AI systems securely? Are the tools being used correctly? Are they being used optimally? Are employees being empowered to use them? What are they using them for? What data is being shared with these tools? The questions (and concerns) are extensive. Which is why adopters should work with an experienced partner, such as Portal26 to overcome the barriers, address concerns and realize the value inherent in GenAI adoption and create AI deployment strategies for rapid impact.
Create an auditable record of the who, what, when and why of GenAI use with Portal26’s GenAI Visibility
GenAI Visibility provides so much more than just oversight for organizations that want to speed up adoption and usage. The software tackles the problem of unmonitored GenAI usage and the implications they have on legal requirements, data privacy and compliance. GenAI Visibility provides visibility into the use of GenAI while also delivering governance, security and education that is a requirement for effective management of the technology.
By using advanced analytics and monitoring techniques, GenAI Visibility tracks usage of GenAI across the entire organization, covering departments and projects. The data collected on usage, patterns and potential risks is compiled into a simplified report that the organization can use to make decisions, mitigate risk and ensure usage is on track and in line with corporate objectives.
Uncover unsanctioned or malicious use of GenAI and enforce policies with GenAI Governance
With the popularity of GenAI tools in both the workspace and personal sphere there is also the risk that employees aren’t necessarily just using tools or platforms that are sanctioned by their employers. As a result, there is a rise of unsanctioned usage or ‘shadow GenAI’ use within an organization which brings its own risks. With Portal26’s GenAI Governance feature, organizations can effectively manage the risk associated with unsanctioned GenAI usage by identifying instances where it is being used, for what purpose and by whom. When it comes to sanctioned usage, GenAI Governance ensures that enterprise GenAI creation projects are set up correctly, with data security, privacy and compliance guardrails in place.
Prevent data loss and secure valuable information with Portal26’s GenAI Data Security feature
GenAI adoption does pose a risk to organizations in terms of its data, its potential exposure to hackers or those who don’t have the correct permissions to view it. GenAI Data Security has been designed to help organizations deal with preserving sensitive information, upholding privacy regulations and mitigating cyber threats. The software is key in deploying AI systems effectively by helping organizations identify and understand the risks posed to them specifically in terms of their data and intellectual property and ensures they are compliant when it comes to keeping sensitive data safe and secure. It also provides internal security teams with the tools they need to manage AI risks, equipping them with exactly what they need. The GenAI Security feature also helps tackle the threat posed by ‘shadow AI’, detecting where unsanctioned AI tools are being used and providing the means to mitigate the risk.
Real-time GenAI policy guidance: educating employees through instant usage feedback
GenAI has the potential to bring substantial benefits to organizations, but its value hinges on proper implementation. Portal26’s GenAI Education and Training feature goes beyond traditional training by providing real-time policy detection and immediate guidance. When employees potentially breach usage policies, the platform instantly triggers a notification, prompting them to either attest to the policy or redirect their approach.
This dynamic approach ensures that employees learn about proper GenAI usage in the moment of interaction. By offering immediate, contextual feedback, Portal26 helps organizations maintain compliance, mitigate risks, and foster a culture of responsible AI use—all while keeping employees productive and informed.
Ease of use, rapid deployment and benefit realization
Work with Portal26 on how to deploy AI effectively; implementing the company’s platform won’t add any additional complexity or barriers to successful GenAI adoption. In fact, the opposite is true: the platform can be deployed in as little as 30 minutes and plugs into existing AI tools – helping optimize AI implementation for maximum business impact.
The result is a quickly and easily deployed tool that has the capabilities to provide answers and solutions to a host of questions and challenges that organizations might have about GenAI adoption, speed of realizing its value and how to overcome slow adoption.
Work with Portal26 to speed up time to impact and return on investment
Portal 26’s full stack AI TRiSM Platform, incorporating features such as GenAI governance, visibility, data security and education can not only help organizations overcome adoption barriers relating to risk, proper usage and lack of expertise, it can also help speed up time to impact and realize a strong return on investment.
To see the platform’s full functionality first-hand, schedule a demo with our team.