Every group of professionals organized in any way you can imagine at this point has some subset of people that have become the power AI users. These are the folks who try every new model and every new product. They report back on what works and what others should do. And in many cases, that role has been formalized into some sort of internal ambassadors or champions program. In fact, across all of my experience with enterprises, the single highest ROI transformation activity that I have seen is when companies structure this sort of internal champions program. Well, today's episode is all about what that actually means. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. It is a federal holiday in the US today. So, this was recorded last week. It's another one of our Operators Cut practical episodes and I hope you enjoy it. All right, Nufar, welcome back to another Operator's Cut. How are you?
I'm good. Thanks for having me. Excited about this one very much.
Yeah. Maybe just to make a bold claim right up front. You and I have both individually and together spent a lot of time interacting with enterprises and companies of all shapes and sizes who are trying to get better at AI. And as part of that, we have tried and they have tried a huge array of different strategies for improving how they use AI, you know, within specific teams or across the board. And what we're going to talk about today is one of the only consistently always successful ways to make the general experience that people have with AI inside a company or inside a team better, right? It just it it never fails is the short answer. This is just such a critical component of what people do. So I'm really excited to dig into it. Introduce us to what you're doing and then I think we'll have a lot to talk about today.
Perfect. Yes. So I agree. We're now presenting the one of the highest ROI activities that you can take in a company in order to be successful with AI and that is to establish a proper network of AI champions. And what I want to do with the session today is the following because we all use AI every day and I'm sure that everybody has seen the same phenomena where someone on the team finds a great way to do something. Often those are the best users out there. They show two people and then it never turns into something the whole team uses. And part of what this episode is trying to do is to help resolve the problem to help define the person. And it might be you, it might be others in your company. Their job is to fix that. The person that helps spread the AI. And I think that many companies have been establishing AI champions for a while now with varied degrees of success, but always in my opinion with a positive outlook and outcome. Overall, my goal is to go over three things to help make it even better. First of all, what the role really is and how to define it and maybe as a byproduct to also help the question that maybe someone listening to this has with yourself of whether they are already the underdefined AI champion in their environment or maybe they should opt to become one. I also want to explain how I believe we should establish a proper network of internal champions. And lastly, I want to discuss what the best AI champions in a given company, what they need to do.
And before we dive in, I want to add three things I think to this. First, I know you're about to give us your definition of an AI champion, but just on a naming convention, I want to point out that across all these different teams that we've worked with, you've worked with, I've worked with, the name is is different for this. Sometimes it's evangelist, sometimes it's leaders, sometimes it's adoption support. Champions is the one I think we've heard the most often, some variation on champions. So, that's what we're referring to. It might you might have heard it differently or have it named differently in your team. The second thing is I think that for those of you who are not inside a big enterprise and are wondering is this worth continuing to invest my time in for the rest of this episode, I would make a fairly strong argument that once you get past a basic or intermediate level, once you're in that advanced AI category, you are going to be thrusted to this role of champion in some way, shape, or form. It's going to be for your friends and family at the very least, but it also is likely if you are working with any number of people on a team, this role inhabiting the champions role, it's a different muscle than just using AI, but communicating how to use it well and thinking in terms where you can share what you're doing, process terms basically rather than just implementation, I guess. And third thing because Nufar wouldn't shout this out. I don't think that there are very many people who have done more versions of this with more different companies than Nufar. So this comes out of a lot of experience and not just hacking at home experience but direct in person dozens and dozens of companies in different contexts in which this type of work has been done.
Thank you. Okay, I now have a cross to bear and that is to first define what it really is. As Nathaniel said, in many cases, you already know this person. That's the person that you pick up the phone to whenever you want to know how to get something with AI done or there is something new that is now accessible and you want to understand how to work with that. And my definition is that the AI champion is the person that in the team or in the environment that is responsible for moving AI adoption and value forward. Often I call them peer plus one because they sit within the team. They do the team's work but they're a step ahead in AI because they already are the person that are most psyched and able in AI or they were appointed to this role. So it doesn't matter whether this appointment was done officially or that's who you are the factor. I think that AI champions are people who show what I can do on the work that the peers actually do. Not theoretical but use cases from the day-to-day of their environment. They also connect with other champions and in many cases with the central AI teams or other professionals in order to build and use the relevant things the company offer and they also move people without necessarily having authority on them forward with their adoption. And before we go to the actual job the role does look quite different in different companies. So I wanted to give you a spectrum. The spectrum is as Nathaniel said based on a lot of experience across multiple companies. On the one hand we have what sometimes companies will refer to as ambassadors. These are the best AI users. Their role is primarily to drive AI adoption to showcase the use case. They will bring their real examples and they will do part of the work as well as training their peers officially or unofficially in that case by the way. And they also know how to voice what the team needs the tools and the internal builds that will help the team move forward with their adoption. At the complete other end of the spectrum we have what we can now call them an internal FDEs. FDEs stands for forward deployed engineers and many of you have probably been hearing this terminology for many years. So it's a bit loaded with many different interpretations because they've been here around for a while but now many of them are very much focusing on AI. So I'm going to define it quite simply in our context as a professional builder who sit inside a business team and builds what the team needs. It can be all the way from idea to production including as we will discuss in the second part the planning the value realization. Some of them come from software and AI background. Some of them and I've seen many of those were subject matter experts who made the real career pivot into building for their teams with the many amazing tools that now many people can build with. In between where many companies typically land the ambassador builder. So they also build for themselves and for their immediate team. They typically will have a well-defined scope of what they can and cannot do or they should have one and beyond that scope they will be almost like a product manager. They will gather the requirements that will bring them to the relevant either vendors or internal teams that can help them build properly what they want. So with the definition out of the way, let's talk about the how-tos. And the how-tos for AI champions, they're comprised of two parts. We have part one which is the company side. How you build a champion network stage by stage and in part two is the champion side. And as we said, whether you're official or unofficial champion, what you need to know and how to do the job well. And I think that the second part especially will be applicable to all of you super users who just want to also progress some of what they do and their thinking. So of course if you are a sponsor the very first part is the playbook for you starting with the company side. And I think that whenever a company is talking about the AI champions they never just ask a single question. They basically ask four questions. Many of them are not necessarily just related to champions. It's just that when you start thinking about how can I create internal movement towards better adoption often these questions come to play. So the first question they often ask is who gets to build and that's basically the democratization question. Who uses what others are building and who's the one that is building for others and themselves. The second question is what do we expect from everyone else? Because champions have a job and so does everybody around them, all the other users. So it creates a lot of questions around expectations from regular users versus champions. They also often ask how does AI spread from the field? Meaning how people in the ground pick up in a way that works whatever was built for them. And lastly, how do the champion work with the central teams or the vendors? And by that I mean the people who own the company's AI tools and the IT and the security and everybody else that makes the decision. And even if nobody in your company has the title of central teams, you are living with these questions because these are like the core things that differentiate between a company that is very opinionated to the ones that are still kind of asking a bunch of questions. Let's go to process of establishing an AI network. I think the very first question that I always like to ask companies is what are you planning to accomplish by establishing an AI champion network and very often they struggle to answer and then the second question that maybe I'm asking on the line between the ambassadors that we've seen to the full builders the forward deployed engineers where do you want your champions to be this one usually opens the conversation because now we're talking about something more concrete what these people will be allowed to do what they'll be expecting to do and what stays within central teams or only professional vendors and builders. And even if you've been defining champions for a while, that's an important discussion to have periodically because sometimes that changes for companies and you might have refined your thinking based on actual experience with democratization and building in on the ground. When you want to start where I want you to configure the goals, the responsibilities and the expectations ideally written down and agreed with everybody else who is involved like IT, security and so on. To give a concrete example, one company that I'm working with after pondering these questions for a while, they realize that primarily what they want is their champions to be a good funnel that brings the relevant use cases from the ground to the central team that is basically blind to the day-to-day reality of the different teams. And as such, it's a completely different discussion and role and training for people whose main purpose is to basically become a funnel for good use cases coming from the team. On the flip side, I've also seen companies that change their mind after a while and then realize that they want to have champions as full-blown builders and then they train them to become much more sophisticated almost like the AI engineers, they breed from the ground up. So that's the stage one. Stage two is the nomination and there are three signals that I want you to look for very first in a good champion. A good champion is a person they are among the most sophisticated AI users without being told to use AI. They just do their peers already come to them to ask questions and to get guidance and their managers will actually give them enough time to work on AI also for others. And that's a big one because often that's when great nominations fall short. Then there are other things like the ability for them to influence without authority, knowing the business ins and outs, taking initiative and a lot of curiosity because as we know everything changes all the time. I want you also to remember that like the person that you will nominate is a person that you want to retain and promote because getting to be the AI champion and then boasting on that on social and so on is a huge perk and also makes this person highly desirable for the market. So make sure that you nominate the people that truly deserve the role. This is also the area of nomination where I've seen companies making endless amount of mistakes and I did want to call them out because they are so common that I will be remiss if I will not call them out. The first thing that I'm seeing is very senior people nominating themselves just because they want to improve their AI skills. So they say I'm going to be the AI champion or because they want to have influence on what's being built. So they nominate this themselves. Senior people should sit in an AI committee like a dedicated steering function that helps make the strategic decision. They shouldn't be the people who are chartered to build and train their peers. I've also seen and that's very common great candidates in terms of their AI ability and everything else falls in place except they're also the busiest people on the team and they just don't have the bandwidths to be the person who builds and trains and so on. So they are not a good use of your time. I've also seen people nominated as a reward. They are strong players. Let's nominate them as AI champions, but they're just not good enough AI users or doesn't hold some of the other traits. And lastly, never nominate the person who just started working yesterday. One of the most important traits that AI champion has is the ability to identify use case and know the business ins and outs. If they don't know, they're new to the team, they will not be a good enough champion. Okay. The next thing that every company that is serious about champions need to do is the training. And of course, you can run it internally if you have strong enough people, you can do a more concentrated boot camp, which is what often I get to do, or you can go gradually and just train them. But even if they are great users, ideally you should train them on specific things, namely part of what I will share in the second part. In my point of view, whichever format you choose, train them on their own work. And my favorite test is very simple. Every champion takes one real use case from their team and shows how they were able to build or promote it by the end of whatever training that you do. If they can do that, they're ready. If not, maybe there is some more work to be done. And usually this stage of the training ends with a kickoff or some kind of certification. A lot of excitement across everybody. People are very proud to have been chosen. And that's where the real test begins and that's where many of the initiatives fail because the biggest predictor of whether this succeeds is what happens the day after you certify someone as a champion. And this is where we start talking about communities or networks and it needs several things. I think one of the most important thing that a successful endeavor like that needs is a sponsor. Ideally two kinds of sponsors. One that is more of the community type coming from HR or the people team or anyone who knows how to run a community inside an organization effectively. They keep the people side alive. But we also want a professional sponsor, the one who works closely with the chief AI officer, if you have one, the one that is very savvy about AI that can also steer the direction of the champions towards the company's AI adoption strategy. This person will set the priorities and will bridge to everyone that the champion depends on namely all of these internal teams and they keep the champions on what matters and keep the company clearing the path for them the approvals and the access and the tools and so on. So these sponsors matter a lot and I think that to name an example and one of the most successful companies that I've seen in establishing an internal network they have a dynamic duo of an L&D expert and an AI expert working together. They regularly keep their hand on the pulse. They regularly make sure that they understand where the champions sit, what they need, what they're building, what the state of the industry is, and always trying to bridge the gap. On the flip side, literally in every company where we might have had an amazing AI champion course that never materialized into business value, the missing piece was the continuation. Nobody took ownership on making sure that the champions are being used effectively and learning continuously. That means that most will just return to the way they used to work before and just to use AI as they used to work and not take it to the next level that we expect a proper initiative like that will take.
