She was the person everyone on her team routed decisions through, and I couldn’t get her to tell me how she did any of it.

For two weeks I kept asking her to walk me through the work, and she kept giving me answers I couldn’t build from. Was she protecting herself? Maybe. I was asking her to describe a process she had never had to write down, because it had only ever lived in her head.

So we stopped asking. My team built a half-baked proof of concept out of the information we had and our intuition: the fields we figured she would collect on each grant, a rough version of how that information might look for her team in a dashboard so they could act on it. Then we showed it to her.

As we expected, much of what we did was wrong (and she let us know). But in that demo the tone of the conversation changed. What she saw in that first attempt at a spreadsheet wasn’t some perfect technology coming for her job. It was a workflow that would enable her team to go after grants they had been ignoring, with her strategy and guidance at the heart of it. It wasn’t the doomsday scenario she had been holding on to. I may be reaching, but I felt like it instead gave her super powers.

That was several months ago, but in the thick of the work I’ve struggled to write these stories down.

Today is my birthday (HBD 🥳 to me!), so it seemed like a good day to reflect on what has changed. A year ago I wrote about my own experiments with AI: what I’d tried, what worked, how you might use it. Now my days are full of workshops, conversations with internal AI champions, and strategy sessions with IT and L&D leaders. What I want to talk about is changing.

I’m seeing so many opportunities to guide how AI is used in an organization. When people are left to work AI out on their own, it tends to land on small daily tasks, and the business impact of that is 🤏 negligible. But misuse doesn’t show up in the budget. Collaboration gets harder, risk increases, and trust erodes in leadership and in whoever is producing the slop.

But say it with me “✨ It doesn’t have to be that way. ✨” When an organization invests in enablement, when teams get paired with someone who can help them redesign how the work happens, new ideas show up and faces light up. People spend more time with their stakeholders and more time doing the work only they can do.

That’s what I’m writing about now. I’ll be in your inbox on Wednesdays: mostly AI champions programs in the near term, then a series on people managers and collaboration.

Tell me where your organization is with AI, and what’s most urgent right now. And if there’s a topic you’re interested in, let me know.

✌🏻 Mariena