671 - Why Your Clients Are Not Using the AI Tools You Recommended with Angie Carel
Why you should listen
- Angie scaled from an 18-year marketing agency to leading AI adoption for 600-person corporations, giving her a rare ground-level view of exactly where companies get stuck and what actually moves people from fear to fluency.
- Learn the "people-first" sequencing Angie now uses before any AI tool deployment, including how she frames corporate AI training as "recess" to sidestep resistance and drive real adoption.
- Get Angie's workflow automation logic: how she mapped every bottleneck in her business using Miro, then eliminated them with Make, enabling her to run 15 trainings in a single week instead of her previous max of three.
If your clients keep investing in AI tools and their teams still aren't using them three months later, the problem isn't the technology. In this episode, I talk with Angie Carel, an AI enablement consultant who spent 18 years running a marketing agency before pivoting full-time into corporate AI adoption in 2022. Angie works with large corporations across finance, healthcare, and higher education, and her view is consistent: jumping straight to use cases before building AI literacy almost always backfires. We dig into the people-first sequencing she now uses to close the gap between deployment and actual adoption, and why framing AI training as "corporate recess" gets results that formal rollouts never do. If you're a consultant whose clients are sitting on AI investment with nothing to show for it, this conversation will reframe how you solve that problem.
Key Highlights
- People Before Pilots: Angie shifted from jumping straight into use cases to leading with AI literacy for the entire company first, including a foundation program for 600 staff before any applied AI work began.
- Corporate Recess: Framing AI exploration as "play time" rather than training dramatically increases adoption rates; pressure to be productive is the biggest adoption killer.
- Personal Use as the Fastest Path to Skill: Employees who use AI in their personal lives first (planning meals, travel, home projects) transfer that intuition to work faster than those who try to learn it on the job.
- Assistants vs. Agents: Angie draws a clear line between AI assistants (human-triggered, bounded by instructions) and autonomous agents (acting without human prompting), a distinction most clients don't understand going in.
- Automation as Capacity Multiplier: By visually mapping her entire workflow in Miro and automating everything automatable, Angie went from three trainings per week to fifteen in one week without adding staff.
About Angie Carel
Angie Carel is a Generative AI Consultant named one of the Top 50 Women to Watch in AI and featured in the IEDC 2025 Yearbook as a leading entrepreneur. After running a 10-person marketing agency for 20 years, she went all-in on AI consulting — and in her first year solo, she's on track to outpace her old agency's revenue. Angie founded AI in FW, Indiana's largest AI community with 700+ members, and Co-Crafted, an AI consultancy collective. She helps organizations adopt AI with a human-first approach and coaches emerging AI consultants on building sustainable practices.
Resources and Links
- Angiecarel.com
- Angie's LinkedIn profile
- Lovable
- Midjourney
- Runway
- Make
- N8N
- Relay
- Google Gemini Deep Research
- Claude
- Claude Code
- The AI Show with Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput
- Google DeepMind podcast
- Previous episode: 670 - Stop Chasing Small Clients
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