
AIパワーユーザーからAIリーダーへ:社内AIチャンピオン制度の作り方
How to Go from AI Power User to AI Leader
How to Go from AI Power User to AI Leader
The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
要約
The AI Daily Brief の Operator's Cut で、NLW と Nufar が社内「AIチャンピオン」の役割と制度設計を語った回。チャンピオンはアンバサダーから社内FDEまでの幅があり、目的設定、指名、研修、継続的なコミュニティ運営が成否を分けると述べている。個人側には、ユースケース選定、ROI、評価、仕様定義などの実務が求められるという。
- ●Nufar はAIチャンピオンを「チーム内でAI導入と価値創出を前進させる人」と定義し、同じチームにいて一歩先を行う「peer plus one」と呼んでいる。
- ●役割は、事例を示し同僚を育てるアンバサダーから、自ら構築する社内FDE(Forward Deployed Engineer)までの幅があり、その中間にアンバサダービルダーがいる。
- ●導入手順は目的の設定、指名、研修、認定後の継続運営の順で、成否を最も左右するのは認定の翌日以降に何が起きるかだと強調する。
- ●指名の失敗例として、上級者の自薦、多忙すぎる人、報酬としての指名、入社直後の人を挙げている。
- ●個人側は、構築すべきかの判断、最小限の技術選択、対象者・ガードレール・評価方法の事前定義が重要で、特に評価は自然に身につかないという。
- ●NLW は、コーディングエージェントを使う非エンジニアが増える中、セキュリティやガードレールの面でチャンピオンの役割はさらに重要になると述べている。
章立て
導入:パワーユーザーとチャンピオン制度
各組織にいるAIパワーユーザーを社内チャンピオンとして位置づける制度が、最も費用対効果の高い施策だと語られる。
AIチャンピオンの定義と3つの類型
peer plus one という定義と、アンバサダー、アンバサダービルダー、社内FDEという役割の幅を説明する。
企業側:目的設定と指名
企業が抱える4つの問いと、目的・責任範囲の文書化、指名の基準、よくある指名ミスを解説する。
研修とスポンサー、翌日以降の運営
実業務のユースケースでの研修、2種類のスポンサー、継続的な学習と研修投資のROIを議論する。
コミュニティ運営と立て直し
定例の場、チャンピオンの上司への働きかけ、入れ替えやすさ、勢いが落ちたネットワークの再建策を述べる。
チャンピオン側:ユースケースからROI・評価まで
アイデアから本番までの道のりと、構築判断・技術選択・要件定義のプレイブックを紹介する。
社内FDEの台頭と研修内容
コードを使う非技術職が増える中でのリスクと、研修で重視すべき評価や人・ビジネス面の知見を議論する。
解説記事
AIを日常的に使いこなす「パワーユーザー」は、どの組織にもいる。しかし、その知見が個人の中にとどまり、チーム全体に広がらないことも多い。The AI Daily Brief の Operator's Cut では、NLW と、多数の企業を支援してきた Nufar が、この課題を解く「AIチャンピオン」制度を取り上げた。企業側の制度設計と、チャンピオン個人が身につけるべき実務の両面から整理した回である。
AIチャンピオンとは何か
NLW は、企業での経験の中で、チャンピオン制度をうまく構造化することが最も費用対効果の高い変革施策だったと述べている。呼び名は組織によりエバンジェリスト、リーダーなどさまざまだが、番組では「チャンピオン」で統一している。
Nufar の定義は、チームの中でAI導入と価値創出を前進させる責任を持つ人である。チームの仕事をしながら一歩先を行くため「peer plus one」とも呼ぶ。公式に任命された人でも、実質的にそうなっている人でもよいという。役割は、同僚の実際の業務に即した使い方を示し、他のチャンピオンや中央のAIチームとつながり、権限なしに周囲の導入を促すことだ。
役割の幅は3段階で語られた。
- アンバサダー:事例を示し同僚を育て、チームに必要なツールを伝える
- アンバサダービルダー:自分とチームのために構築する。範囲を決め、それを超える部分は要件をまとめてベンダーや社内チームに依頼する
- 社内FDE(Forward Deployed Engineer):業務チーム内にいて、アイデアから本番まで作る専門的なビルダー
企業側の設計:目的、指名、研修
Nufar は、企業がチャンピオンを語るときに必ず出る問いとして、誰が作るのか、一般ユーザーに何を期待するか、現場にどう広げるか、中央チームやベンダーとどう連携するかの4つを挙げた。そのうえで、最初に「何を達成したいのか」を問うべきだとする。実際には答えに詰まる企業が多いという。目的と責任範囲は、IT やセキュリティの関係者とも合意して文書化することを勧めている。
例として、現場の事例を中央チームに届ける「漏斗」役を求めた企業もあれば、後から本格的なビルダーとして育成する方針に変えた企業もあるという。
指名では、AIを言われなくても使いこなしていること、同僚が相談に来ること、上司がAIに充てる時間を認めていることを重視する。権限なしに影響を与える力や、業務理解、好奇心も挙げた。避けるべき例は、上級者の自薦、多忙すぎる人、報酬としての指名、入社直後の人である。上級者は戦略を決める委員会に置くべきだと述べている。
研修は自社の実業務に即して行う。簡単なテストとして、各チャンピオンが自チームの実ユースケースを一つ取り上げ、構築または展開の様子を示せれば合格とする。
認定の翌日から始まる運営
Nufar は、成否の最大の予測因子は認定の翌日以降に何が起きるかだと強調する。そのために、人を支えるコミュニティ担当(HRや人事部門など)と、AI戦略に沿って優先順位を決め、承認やアクセスの道を開く専門担当という2種類のスポンサーを置くことを勧めた。成功例として、L&D(人材開発)の専門家とAI専門家のペアを挙げている。
定例の共有の場を設けること、チャンピオンの上司にも期待値を説明する短いセッションを行うことも重要だという。指名された全員が続けられるわけではないため、辞めやすく、新規参加もしやすい「生きたネットワーク」にする。勢いが落ちた場合は、スポンサーを決め、各人の稼働時間を確認し、抜けたい人を円滑に外して新たに指名するよう助言した。NLW は、訓練対象が限られ効果が大きいため、研修投資の入口として有望だと補足している。
チャンピオン個人の実務
個人側では、アイデアから本番までの全行程を理解することが求められる。構築前、構築、構築後の価値実現・展開・廃止の3つの局面だ。
構築前には、解く価値のある課題を選ぶ。コストは高め、初日の価値は低めに見積もるなど保守的に考え、既存の取り組みとの重複も確認する。そのうえで、そもそも作るべきかを問う。頻度、価値、ミスのコストを考え、再利用、購入、構築、バックログのどれにするか決める。個人にも企業にも構築への偏りがあるため、情熱プロジェクトにしないことが大事だという。
技術選択では、全部をエージェントにしようとせず、最も単純な解から始める。共有プロンプトと資料、スキル、自動化、エージェントの順に、正当な理由があるときだけ複雑にする。
要件定義では、誰向けか(「全員」は不可)、必要な知識、使われ方、絶対にしてはならないこと、出力を誰が確認するか、動作確認の方法を書き出す。評価用のケースを早期に作れば、品質を保証できない案件を作る前に止められるという。
社内FDEの台頭とチャンピオンの重要性
対談の後半で NLW は、技術職でなくてもコーディングエージェントで業務を進める人が増えていると指摘した。強力な反面、セキュリティやガードレールの課題が生じ、エージェントが想定外のシステムに入り込む例もあると述べている。そのためチャンピオンの役割はより重要になると見る。Nufar は、非専門のビルダーを締め出すのではなく、基盤整備と、業務を知る専門家への研修で支えるべきだと応じた。
研修では、構築技術そのものは独学しやすい。一方、評価の方法や、ビジネス・技術・人をつなぐ部分は自然には身につかず、プレイブックもまだ書かれつつある段階だと述べている。
まとめ
この回の要点は、AI活用の定着は個人のスキルだけでなく、役割定義、指名、研修、継続運営という組織設計の問題だということだ。日本企業でも、AI推進担当や有志コミュニティを置く例は多いだろう。その際、目的を文書化する、時間を確保する、スポンサーを置く、上司を巻き込むといった点が参考になる。個人のパワーユーザーにとっても、作る前の判断、最小構成、評価の事前設計は、すぐ取り入れられる指針だ。なお、本回の主張は Nufar と NLW の経験に基づくもので、定量的な検証は示されていない。また、番組の終盤では Nufar らによるチャンピオン向けブートキャンプの案内があったが、本記事では詳細を扱わない。
文字起こし(英語・自動生成)
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. 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 AIDailyBrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIDailyBrief.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? 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 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 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 herself of whether they're 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 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 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 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 de facto. I think that AI champions are people who show what AI 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 Natalia 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 bills 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 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 in 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 sits 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 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 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 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 basically the democratization question Who uses what others are building and who is 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 team, 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 you've seen to the full builder, 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 on the ground. When you want to start well, 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 realized 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 that is 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 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 amiss 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 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 needs 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 things 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, in 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 hands 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. One of the things that is interesting and maybe 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 and 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 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. Yeah, I agree. And a 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 A new study from KPMG in the University of Texas at Austin
found that when people work with AI, similar skills don't guarantee similar outcomes. Researchers studied more than 500 early career professionals and found that the best performers consistently amplified the value of AI by guiding, evaluating, and refining its outputs. These top performers, called AI amplifiers, weren't defined by what they knew alone, but by how they worked with AI. Learn more about what separates AI amplifiers from everyone else at kpmg.com slash US slash AI amplifiers. Here's a harsh truth. Your company is probably spending thousands or millions of dollars on AI tools that are being massively underutilized. Half of companies have AI tools, but only 12% use them for business value. Most employees are still using AI to summarize meeting notes. If you're the one responsible for AI adoption at your company, you need Section. Section is a platform that helps you manage AI transformation across your entire organization. It coaches employees on real use cases, tracks who's using AI for business impact, and shows you exactly where AI is and isn't creating value.
The result? You go from rolling out tools to driving measurable AI value. Your employees move from meeting summaries to solving actual business problems. And you can prove the ROI. Stop guessing if your AI investment is working. Check out Section at SectionAI.com. That's S-E-C-T-I-O-N-A-I.com. Every episode, we cover the competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX AI, Google, and Meta. Chances are you've already formed an opinion about who's leading. But every AI lab is taking a different approach, building different technologies, forging different partnerships, and developing a unique ecosystem. Harbor Capital Advisors' AI Lab Ecosystem ETF Suite gives investors a way to gain exposure to the AI ecosystem they believe is best positioned for success. Search Harbor AI Lab ecosystem ETFs wherever you invest or follow at Harbor Capital on X to learn more. Visit harborcapital.com for a prospectus containing investment objectives, risks, fees, expenses, and other important information. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Risks include principal loss and artificial intelligence-related risks. Harbor ETFs are distributed by Foresight Fund Services, LLC. Harbor is not affiliated with AI Daily Brief,
and the funds are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any AI lab. This is a paid advertisement and not personalized investment advice. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principle. Every AI coding tool on the market does the same thing first. It starts writing code. Blitzy does the opposite. Before writing a single line, Blitzy spends days reverse engineering your entire codebase. Thousands of agents ingest millions of lines, mapping every dependency, every undocumented constraint, every architectural decision made over the last decade. The result is a dynamic knowledge graph that understands your software the way a principal engineer would after 30 years in the building. Other tools guess at context with grep searches and markdown files. Blitzy never guesses. It builds true understanding first, then delivers over 80% of entire software epics autonomously. Validated, end-to-end tested, production-grade pull requests. That's why Fortune 500 engineering teams trust Blitzy with the codebases that matter most. See for yourself at Blitzy.com. That's B-L-I-T-Z-Y dot com. Let'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're expected to do, like 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 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 has 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 and 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 are 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 are 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 the 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 builds 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 will 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 sure that this great thing that we've built is getting into the right people's hands frequently enough and with the right usage mode? There's 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 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 spot the use case, describe it clearly, and make the case. This is what it costs us today. This is where 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 to 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 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'll 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 you need to 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. So a good champion also has the mental model of what's the right technology for the job. Sometimes it can be a shared set up 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 want you 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 the champions are kind of being mindful about is defining the core properties before you start to build. So these are the things that you probably need to write down as requirements or as specs 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 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, a.k.a. 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, 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 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 train them on all of these and more. Awesome. 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.
It's not necessarily a technical person by definition, but is someone who's figured out how to start using code and agentic coding tools 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 challenges. Some of them are just knowing what to use that for and how to do that and how to even think in those terms. But a second part is obviously all the 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. And 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 believe that this is even more challenging than mastering the technology itself. 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 transmit it internally? I mean, obviously, I think it's both, but how do you view that breakdown? So 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.
There are many ways, including just try and know 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 a YouTube video or 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. All right. Well, Nufar, this is awesome stuff. Last thing to mention, I guess, for 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 AIDailyBrief.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.
番組の概要欄(原文)
<p>As AI becomes central to work, a new leadership opportunity is emerging for those who can help others use it effectively. In this Operator's Cut, NLW and Nufar explore how AI power users can become leaders on their teams, the skills that distinguish great AI champions, and how companies can build programs that turn individual expertise into real business value.</p><p><strong>Learn More about the AI Champions Program: </strong><a href="https://www.besuper.ai/champions" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://www.besuper.ai/champions</a></p><p><strong>Brought to you by:</strong></p><p><strong>KPMG</strong> – Research from KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin shows the highest-impact AI users treat AI like a reasoning partner — and those skills can be taught at scale. Learn more at <a href="https://kpmg.com/us/Sophisticated" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://kpmg.com/us/Sophisticated</a></p><p><strong>Granola</strong> - The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings. Try it free <a href="http://granola.ai/brief" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">granola.ai/brief</a> </p><p><strong>Harbor - </strong>Invest in the AI ecosystem. <a href="https://www.harborcapital.com/aidaily" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://www.harborcapital.com/aidaily</a></p><p><strong>Section</strong> - Section turns AI investment into workforce transformation and ROI - <a href="https://www.sectionai.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://www.sectionai.com/</a></p><p><strong>Blitzy - </strong>Want to accelerate enterprise software development velocity by 5x? <a href="https://blitzy.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://blitzy.com/</a></p><p><strong>Robots & Pencils</strong> - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results <a href="https://robotsandpencils.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://robotsandpencils.com/</a></p><p>The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. </p><p><strong>Newsletter: </strong><a href="https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/</a></p><p><strong>Interested in sponsoring the show? </strong>sponsors@aidailybrief.ai</p><p><br></p>
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