Building AI champions inside orgs
A This Dot Media recap highlighted that successful AI adoption needs named 'AI champions', executive sponsorship, and redesigned workflows to move pilots into production. The post underscores change management and sponsorship as recurring blockers to cross‑team AI rollout. (x.com)
This Dot Media streamed a State of AI session titled "State of AI — State of AI Champions" that featured speakers Tracy Lee and Elliott Fouts and focused on intentionally growing internal AI advocates from individual contributors, tech leads, and engineering managers. (youtube.com) RAND’s report "The Root Causes of Failure for Artificial Intelligence Projects" found that more than 80% of AI projects fail and that conclusion is based on interviews with 65 experienced data scientists and engineers. (rand.org) Gartner warned that 60% of AI projects lacking AI‑ready data are likely to be abandoned through 2026, highlighting data readiness as a concrete gating factor for scaling pilots. (gartner.com) A documented scaling playbook used at Moderna included running a company‑wide prompt contest to identify the top 100 power users, converting them into champions, establishing local office hours across business lines and geographies, and creating an internal forum with roughly 2,000 active weekly participants to sustain adoption. (itrevolution.com) This Dot Labs markets turnkey offerings to close those capability gaps—an AI readiness assessment and a $20,000 two‑week roadmap engagement—and has scheduled AI Leadership Exchange events such as an Atlanta session in partnership with Nx to surface cross‑team workflow and governance patterns. (ai.thisdot.co)
