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How to Go from AI Power User to AI Leader

39m 29s

How to Go from AI Power User to AI Leader

This episode of the AI Daily Brief's Operator's Cut features Nufar explaining how to build an effective internal AI champions network, which the hosts describe as the single highest-ROI transformation activity they have seen across enterprises. The discussion begins with defining the champion role, noting that titles vary across companies but the function is consistent: power AI users who test new tools and spread effective practices to colleagues. Companies must first clarify their goals for the network and determine whether champions should act as ambassadors who identify and hand off use cases or as full builders who take solutions from idea to production. The episode outlines a three-stage process: configuration, nomination, and training. Nomination should prioritize sophisticated users with peer credibility, manager support, business knowledge, and curiosity, while avoiding common mistakes like self-nominating senior leaders, overloading busy top performers, or selecting new hires. Training should cover use case identification, ROI articulation, deployment, and evaluation, with each champion demonstrating a real team use case. The day after certification matters most: successful networks need dual sponsors, regular community routines, manager education, and flexible membership. Champions must master a checklist covering whether to build, what to build, and how to define requirements and guardrails. The hosts also discuss how non-technical builders using agentic coding tools make the champion role increasingly mission-critical, and announce a new AI champions bootcamp.

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English
Speaker 1Every 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. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Section, Harbor, and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai-daily-brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at ai-daily-brief.ai. Lastly today, it is a federal holiday in the U.S. today, so this was recorded last week. It's another one of our Operator's Cut practical episodes, and I hope you enjoy it. All right, Nufar, welcome back to another Operator's Cut. How are you?
Speaker 2I'm good. Thanks for having me. Excited about this one very much.
Speaker 1Yeah, 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 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 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.
Speaker 2Perfect. Yes, so I agree. We're now presenting 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. 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 themselves 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.
Speaker 1And 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 different for this. Sometimes it's evangelist, sometimes it's leader, 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. 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 champion's 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.
Speaker 2Basically, 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 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 you've seen to the full builders the four 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 expected 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 well i want you to configure the goals the responsibilities and 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 the ai engineers they breed from the ground up so that's the the stage one stage two is the nomination and there are three channels 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 the 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 a miss 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 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 the 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 bandwidth 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 the 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 to nominate the person who just started working yesterday 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 i 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 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 lnd 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 of the coin and they're always trying to bridge the gap and always trying to bridge the gap on the flip side of the coin and they're always trying to bridge the gap on the flip side of the coin and they're always trying to bridge the gap on the flip side of the coin and they're always trying to bridge the gap on the flip side of the coin and they're 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 would be. as they used to work and not take it to the next level that we expect a proper initiative like that
Speaker 1one of the things that is interesting and and may be obvious to some but is not necessarily always obvious is that i think a real challenge for enterprise decision makers is both how much to invest in the right way to invest in training their people with ai it doesn't fit comfortably into previous models of corporate upskilling because it's so much more robust and all encompassing but at the same time there's no established standards. there's no established standards or clear best practices really yet that everyone agrees upon for how to do this and because of all that that i think makes the question of how much to invest in different categories of people really hard this is once again one exception where whatever training you can do for this group who is going to be then disseminating the most useful parts of that the most contextually relevant for that business parts of that it's just an extremely high roi category of training. even relative to other areas that makes it a valuable place to intersect i guarantee that there are still lots and lots of companies out there that have yet to invest in any sort of formal training if you're one of those this is i think a place to potentially look as a good intersection and a good starting point.
Speaker 2yeah i agree and relatively small number of people that has a huge impact on the company versus training everyone and that often is getting lost in too many people too many variants. yeah i agree and relatively small number of people that has a huge impact on the company versus training everyone and that
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Speaker 2Let's talk about the community, because first thing that I will say that everything that is true for any internal community is true here. You want routines, you want champions to meet regularly and make it easy for them to share the things that they're doing, to learn together and to get celebrated when they have interesting accomplishments based on what matters to you that they will do. Another one that is underrated is to work with the champions managers, because what I often see is great champions whose managers don't have realistic expectations, or don't know how to use them, or there is simply too big of a gap in the knowledge between the champion and the person who manages them. And then everybody is very frustrated. So a short session, it can be very short, to the managers of the champions to explain to them what the champions know, what they expected to do, how to effectively leverage them, creates a big difference in leveraging the output of the fact that you already established these champions. And lastly, about the day after, I think that not everybody who was nominated will actually become champion, either because they or their managers have different expectations than what they have, or people might leave, the work gets too busy, and some realize, and I've seen that many, many times, the role is just not for them. It sounded very good on paper, but they just don't want to do that. So the network has to be a very living entity. It needs to enable people to go and leave the network easily, and then they can hand it over to someone else. And then they can hand it over to someone else, and then they can in the team. We want to make it easy for new people to join in a clear way, and education never stops. So it's always happening. And if you already have a network and it's losing energy, this is where you start. Name your two sponsors, check that every champion still have the one or two days or sufficient capacity to do the work. And if needed, re-instigate the commitment with their managers. Also, let the people who can't do the work step out of the role. Thank them and nominate new people all the time. The most tired networks that I see are missing one of these elements that I just called out. So that's the company side, the clear goal, the right people, the right training, and the day after that is also a living, breathing entity. Let's move to the champion side. And here I'm also reverting to what you said at the beginning. Even if you're not an official champion, but you are the best AI user in the company or in your environment, I think that you should listen to that because these things are what differentiate regular power user from one that is geared towards yielding more business value. So a champion needs to know stuff that other employees not necessarily. I think it doesn't matter if you are like a pure ambassador or you're a full builder, a champion needs to understand the whole road an AI use case travels all the way from idea to production, meaning something that people actually use every day. And I think that there are like three stretches before the build, meaning that you know your ground, you know what the company allows to do and where the use cases reside. You also need to decide if, what, and how to build. Then you have the build itself from POC to production. How do you create the agent or the automation of the capability? And of course here, the proportion is based on the skills and how much you're allowed to build and what are the tools that you have. And after the build, there is the entire part of the value realization, deployment, and retiring a solution when needed. So I want to give you a few thoughts on each of them. And these are like the main stops or the main things that a good champion should be able to do well. So does, by the way, a great power user. So the first thing that I want you to hone in on is the use case identification. I want you to find the problems in your domain that are worth solving and where the cost is justifying the money or the investment. And you have to be a little bit conservative here in the sense that assume that the investment will be higher than you anticipated and that the value will not necessarily be as high in day one as you anticipated. Your ability to articulate who suffers from this problem, how often, and what done look like really changes the picture. And then checking your idea that you have against what already exists so that the company build everything just one time and not 100 times of the same use case. Another thing that I want you to pay attention to as a champion is the ROI. That's just being able to articulate what it's worth versus what it costs. The core knowledge here, as I said, is to be the realistic person. And it means that you need to ask a bunch of questions about how it will be used. Does it move a company like a critical performance indicator? What would it need to do in order to measure or make sure that we achieve the goals? I also want you to be very focused as a champion on the deployment side. How do we make this great thing that we've built is getting into the right people's hands frequently enough and with the right usage mode? There is a question of where does it live, who approves it, and who supports it in day two, not just day one where everybody's excited. And lastly, and that's a big important thing, the evaluation. How do you know that the stuff that you built is actually good? How do we know that we can trust it? How do we know when we cannot trust it? How do we understand the risks of the mistakes? And I think it's really important to be able to understand the risks of the mistakes. And I think it's one of the most important skills for any champion to be able to sign off on, is the thing good enough to put in the hands of users? I'm reverting to the definitions and I want to make it more concrete because for the same use case, the different types of champions might address differently. For example, maybe we have a use case where the team spends hours every week assembling a summary of a customer renewal, okay? The ambassador is primarily going to write the use case, describe it clearly, and make the case. This is what it cost us today. This is why I think it's solvable. And then they will take it to a central team or a vendor as a very clean request that someone professional can execute. Once the solution is ready, then they make sure that the value is actually realized, that the team uses that properly. So they're introduced at the beginning and at the end. The ambassador builder also will build the version that works for their own team inside the scope that the company allows them to build. And then perhaps a second team will take it over from them. And then they will take it over from the other team. And then they will fully productize. And then, of course, they will need to be back for the deployment. And the internal FD, they can take it all the way, including the build and everything else. Whichever your champion's role is configured of, I want to give a few playbooks to make sure that the parts that they are doing will be done well. And also this is relevant to other power users. Okay. So the first question that you should ask before anything gets built is whether or not you should even build that. And I think you will be surprised how many times people don't even stop to ask, should we build it? just go ahead and build. The thing that you need to check is how often does this come up? Like, is it a concrete use case? How much does it worth? And how costly the mistake is? Because if the value and the error tolerance justify it, the decision will then be between reuse something maybe that is already existing, buying something, building, or maybe just adding it to the backlog for building in future state. But I think there is such a huge bias towards building among individuals and companies that part of being a good champion is making these decisions from the grounded and the company-connected point of view, not as a passion project, but something that justifies the investment. The second thing that I wanted to make sure that as a champion you pay attention to is what should it be? Because I think that nowadays we feel that everything needs to be an agent, fully connected, doing everything, and so on. And I believe that keeping it simple or building the simplest solution that solves the problem is the way to go. A good champion also has the mental model of what's the right technology for the job. Sometimes it can be a shared set setup that is enough, like a prompt, instructions, and files that your team reuses. Sometimes a skill nowadays is the best way to do it, the most streamlined way to create the playbooks that can run on demand. And sometimes it's an automation. The same steps will be executed every time. Sometimes there is a good justification for it to be a full-blown agent that you build for the team and so on. But that's not always the case. I wanted to start with the simplest one that solves the problem and identify that there is a true justification to go from left to right. And we're not just building the most complex thing that we can think of, only to be left with something very hard to build, maintain, and test. And lastly, the last playbook that I wanted to make sure that champions are being mindful about is defining the core properties before you start to build. And this is something that you probably need to write down as requirements or as spec for what's being built. And each of them carries a lot of weight. Who is it for? Everyone is not a good answer because anyone who has done any good UX knows that designing for everybody is designing for nobody. So be specific about the target audience. What it needs to know, and this is, by the way, often when you discover that you have an entirely new project to do just to curate the relevant knowledge for your idea before you can even start executing the idea that you have in mind. I also want you to ask how people will use it so that it will actually be used and not a glorious vibe-coded application that nobody remembers where the URL is. And what it must never ever do, aka concrete and detailed guardrails. Often, by the way, starting the thinking with what your solution must never do creates much more important clarity about what it should do. And then ask yourself, who checks the output? Where do you enforce human judgment as part of the loop? And how do you balance business value and quality or safety of what you're building? And lastly, how do you know that it works? You want to configure the use cases. It needs to be tested against as early as possible because when you configure the use cases, often that surfaces critical conversations about edge cases and how difficult it can be to evaluate them. And this also helps to build the right thing and also helps kill it before it's built because of the inability to ensure quality. Which is often the case. So this is going to be the file that champions will hand over, whether they're handing it over to a vendor or to the central team or even to themselves. It's a critical practice to do before. So I wanted to give you a glimpse of three questions that I think differentiate between a regular power user and a champion or a user that is very mindful about building the right thing in the right way. I'm calling that often the builders or the champions checklist. As we're wrapping things up, I think that one more thing that I wanted to observe is that unlike many things in AI nowadays, these playbooks are not as transient as some of the other things because the tools, they will change every quarter. And part of being a good champion or fostering a good champion network includes also teaching them the latest and greatest in tools and in building techniques or identifying use cases techniques. But I deliberately spotlighted the things that remain valid, even if the technology races forward, because you will still need the right people with the time to do it. You will still need to decide where on the line they sit. Between ambassador and builder and write it down, they will still need to get the whole road from idea to production and somebody will still need to own the day after. So if all of these are done right by your champions, you are much better positioned to establish a successful process. And if you are the champion themselves, these are one of the best seats in the company. I can guarantee you because you see the problems across the team, you work with the teams or you build yourself and you learn the beginning and the end of the process. So I think that's a really good example of what we can do to help build the team and the end of the road of building while most people only know kind of the middle of how to build the stuff in the middle. And in order to help people do that properly, we are establishing an AI champions bootcamp. So this is all very opinionated towards what we believe champions need to do. And we're starting quite shortly. So if you want to be a champion in your company, or you were nominated as a champion in your company, or maybe you're the sponsor who wants to send a bunch of your champions our way, we'll be very happy to try and help you. So if you want to be a champion in your company, or maybe you're the on all of these and more.
Speaker 1Awesome. So going back to the idea of how this role evolves and how it doesn't evolve. One really important context that I'm seeing more that's sort of been lurking for all year, but is getting even more urgent now is it's a version of the internal FTE. That's not necessarily a technical person by definition, but is someone who has figured out how to start using code and agentic coding tools to, you know, help people to solve some parts of their work or to do parts of their work. It's the best example, I think right now for companies and people inside companies of the power and challenge of AI all at once. Obviously, it is incredibly powerful for all these people to be able to use code to do things for their jobs that they weren't able to before. But it creates this massive new set of, of challenges. Some of them are just knowing what to use that for and how to do that and how to do that. And how to even think in those terms. But a second part is obviously all this sort of security and guardrails issues that come up. And increasingly, that's not just because people are doing it wrong, but because the agents are powerful and tenacious enough that they tend to escape containment pretty quickly and kind of weed their way into lots of different systems. So I actually see that as an area where the role of champions is going to become even more mission critical because it's not just, hey, we're under optimizing this opportunity. It's, you know, the roles are changing, fundamentally, and creating all these new challenges. And we simply have to figure out how to solve all those challenges so we can kind of move forward. So I think that this type of mindset and this type of role is going to become just nothing but more important for companies going forward. I agree.
Speaker 2And instead of shutting them down, because you're concerned that less professional builders are building, do the enablement and the infrastructure and even train more of the subject matter experts because they will work on the right use cases. And I agree with that.
Speaker 1And I think that's one of the things that I think is going to be really, really important. So going back to the training, and obviously, this is going to be a part of the boot camp. But what do you see, broadly speaking, as how much is that about the skills of AI and making sure that they're as up to date as possible and current with the state of the art versus some specific discipline around how they transmitted internally? I mean, obviously, I think it's both. But you know, how do you view that that breakdown?
Speaker 2So obviously, you need both. But I actually think that the building part is the easy part in the sense that's not necessarily unique knowledge, that there are many ways, including just trial and error, where people learn how to build some of the things. Where it matters is, for example, the topic that I've shown. So evaluation of what you're building is not something that someone accidentally lands upon. That's something that differentiates the champion from the regular user. So we will pay a lot of emphasis on the things that are not just teachable by watching, I don't know, a YouTube video or, you know, playing with a tool and just figuring it out for yourself, because the tool itself is very powerful in letting you know what to do, or even doing the work for you. But let's call it the in-between business technology and people side of everything that I just called out. Like I mentioned before, these are the things that we will make sure that people come out with proper playbooks, because many of them are still being written as we speak. And it's not something that most companies will know how to train their own people.
Speaker 1All right. Well, Nufar, this is awesome stuff. Last thing folks who watch this and who want to start bringing some of these ideas back to their organization, I will be posting this presentation on the companion website for this episode, which is at ai-dailybrief.ai. So you can go back and see all of these sort of the breakdowns and all this sort of stuff. But Nufar, always great to have you on the show. I think this is a particularly important topic and excited to see how and learn more about how people are approaching this issue. you

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Every professional group naturally develops power AI users who test new tools and report back, and formalizing them as internal champions is the highest-ROI AI transformation activity observed in enterprises.
  2. Companies must first define what they want their champion network to accomplish and where champions sit on the spectrum between ambassadors and full builders.
  3. Champion selection should target sophisticated AI users with peer credibility, manager support, business knowledge, and curiosity, while avoiding self-nominating senior leaders, overloaded top performers, and new hires.
  4. Champions need specific training covering use case identification, ROI articulation, deployment, and evaluation, validated by having each champion build one real use case from their team.
  5. Successful networks require two sponsors—a community-oriented one from HR and a technically savvy one aligned with AI strategy—plus regular meetings, manager education, and easy entry and exit.
  6. Champions must understand the full journey of a use case from idea to production, including deciding whether to build, choosing the simplest adequate solution, and defining requirements and guardrails before building.
  7. The rise of non-technical builders using agentic coding tools makes the champion role more critical, not less, due to new security and enablement challenges.
  8. The core playbooks remain stable even as tools change, and a dedicated AI champions bootcamp is being launched to teach these skills.

Summary:

This episode of the AI Daily Brief's Operator's Cut features Nufar explaining how to build an effective internal AI champions network, which the hosts describe as the single highest-ROI transformation activity they have seen across enterprises. The discussion begins with defining the champion role, noting that titles vary across companies but the function is consistent: power AI users who test new tools and spread effective practices to colleagues. Companies must first clarify their goals for the network and determine whether champions should act as ambassadors who identify and hand off use cases or as full builders who take solutions from idea to production.

The episode outlines a three-stage process: configuration, nomination, and training. Nomination should prioritize sophisticated users with peer credibility, manager support, business knowledge, and curiosity, while avoiding common mistakes like self-nominating senior leaders, overloading busy top performers, or selecting new hires. Training should cover use case identification, ROI articulation, deployment, and evaluation, with each champion demonstrating a real team use case.

The day after certification matters most: successful networks need dual sponsors, regular community routines, manager education, and flexible membership. Champions must master a checklist covering whether to build, what to build, and how to define requirements and guardrails. The hosts also discuss how non-technical builders using agentic coding tools make the champion role increasingly mission-critical, and announce a new AI champions bootcamp.

FAQs

An AI champion is a power AI user within a team or company who helps spread effective AI use, shares best practices, and supports colleagues in adopting AI tools.

It is one of the most consistently successful ways to improve AI adoption and business value, because a small number of well-supported champions can have a huge impact across the organization.

Start by defining clear goals, responsibilities, and expectations; nominate the right people; provide targeted training; and ensure ongoing community support with sponsors and manager alignment.

Good champions are already sophisticated AI users, are sought out by peers for guidance, have manager support and time, can influence without authority, know the business, take initiative, and stay curious.

Avoid nominating senior people who self-select for influence, the busiest people who lack bandwidth, people nominated as a reward without sufficient AI skills, and brand-new employees who don't know the business.

The day after certification is critical. Companies need active community routines, two sponsors (community and professional), manager education, and a living network that allows people to join or leave easily.

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