How a former Visa exec’s ACT delivered 98% GenAI adoption

Episode 169: How a former Visa exec’s ACT delivered 98% GenAI adoption

“I have found that the people who sit in the markets, they tend to be the ones that will adopt things more quickly if you’ve done your audience work properly. So, if you’ve crafted that value proposition in a way that feels very real for them and is in their context, they’re much more likely to join – because they already have that ‘outside in’ kind of ‘audience-first perspective’. They already know that you need to meet the customer where they are because they live within the environment of the customer. So if you can engage and embrace the people who run the markets, they can have a profound impact on really getting the adoption out, especially when you’ve got those smaller offices where it’s harder to reach everybody. If you can get people in the markets to be very excited and talking about this, they become very strong influencers for you.”

Stacey Taylor
Founder, Marking Change

Nancy Goebel
Today I’m joined by Stacey Taylor, a marketing-led transformation leader whose ACT framework – Audience, Connection and Tuning – can help turn change fatigue into pull at scale.

In this conversation we break down how a go-to-market mindset, internal influencers and a practical measurement menu can move adoption of generative AI from ‘pilot purgatory’ to ‘real-world outcomes’, including a standout case reporting 98% adoption of generative AI at Visa.

This is Nancy Goebel, DWG’s Chief Executive and your host. Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by Digital Workplace Group. Join me now in conversation with Stacey. Happy listening!

Stacey, I am so excited to be in conversation with you. Welcome to the Digital Workplace Impact Podcast Studio.

Stacey Taylor
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Nancy
Of course, scene setting is always important. We were brought together by an esteemed colleague from both of our orbits, Andrea Brant, who happens to be the Head of Member Advisory Services at DWG. When I heard about your background, your accomplishments, your insights, I felt it was really important to create this backdrop for conversation. I know that you are someone who has had a wealth of experience, whether it’s as part of your time at Visa or the projects that you’ve been on since then.

So, we are in a time when leaders can be overworked. We’re in a period of disruption and transformation. And often there are waves of trying to survive – if not thrive – as part of those waves of change and transformation. I know that you are someone who thinks about change as a product and not a project. I think that’s a really interesting place to start our conversation because the parallel that I would draw is that in digital workplace circles, we’ve long said very much the same thing. And so why is it important to think about change in that way from your standpoint?

Stacey
Yeah, first I just wanted to reiterate what you were talking about in terms of people ‘barely surviving’. There are lots of stats out there: one that I just wanted to bring to your audience’s attention is a study that was done by Gartner, which had shown in 2016 that maybe only about two changes were planned in a given year. And then you jump to 2022 after the pandemic and they’re seeing 10. But during that same time, what also is happening is the trust in the change has declined from somewhere around 74% to 43%, something like that. So this experience of having this tremendous amount of change is a real thing. And I’ve talked to a lot of transformation leaders who are telling me that what they’re seeing is more like 12, 15, 16.

And I bring that up because the approaches to change that we were using in the past when we had two or four or five changes in a year just are no longer going to cut it in this period now where we might be experiencing 16. And so this mindset of product versus project really can be very powerful and can open up people’s minds and really helping them to think differently about how they actually build their enablement programmes.

And what I mean there is, when you have a project mindset, what you measure for success is the launch. You’ve deployed your solution, you’ve deployed whatever it was, you have pulled together the working team, you did your postmortem, closed the project, success.

When you have a product mindset, your success is completely different. Now you’re thinking more around adoption and sustained behaviour. So, as a product manager, you don’t say, ‘Oh, we did it. We shipped the product!’ Instead, what you’re focusing on is: Are they buying the product? Did they download the SDK? Are they doing API calls? You know, depending on the on the business model. And then they want that repeated behaviour, which would be repeat purchases or staying in and continuing to do that subscription. So when you start to shift where your accountability is and your accountability is much more focused on a business outcome, then it shifts how you’re going to actually design the programme, how long you’re going to stay engaged in the programme, and what you’re going to measure and when you’re going to measure it.

Nancy
Well, I think that’s such a powerful starting point for the conversation and so complementary with the way we’re thinking about change within DWG circles as well. In fact, when I put out my predictions for the digital workplace the year before last, looking at 2025, I put out the assertion that ‘change agility’ was going to be the new social currency of the enterprise, with the idea that change management was very much that project mindset – and if you think back to technology deployments of old, very often you had teams disappear for a year, 18 months, three years, whatever the timeline happened to be. And then change management was something that happened on the back end and it was all about the launch. Then it was on to the next project.

Whereas, with change agility, it’s the idea that we are in a period of continuous change, and in fact change is happening with velocity. And so, the approach that you take needs to mirror what we talk about as agile methodology, previously technology, now from a change point of view.

I know that within your time at Visa, you introduced this framework called ACT as the change enabler inside of the organization and that you’ve since gone on to use this capability, this framework, in a number of different ways. I wonder if you could give us the 67 origin story for ACT and then tell us a little bit about what each pillar represents and then we can go into a deep dive from there.

Stacey
Yeah, that sounds great. One thing I wanted to clarify is, the way I use ACT – and it will make sense when I tell the origin story – is that this is the way I think about change. It isn’t necessarily a formal framework that I deployed. So I just wanted to make that clarification, but I was able to influence other change practitioners within the company to take on this more agile approach because they were also just drowning in, you know, so many initiatives. How could they get out of that and start to work more quickly?

So, for me, I fell into change and transformation like a lot of other people, just completely by accident. And we have to take me back almost 20 years when I really think about where the origin of this thinking came from. At the time I was at Adobe and, prior to this moment, I had spent about 15 years or so of my career as a statistician, a social scientist, in market research. And then I moved into more of a marketing operations and strategy role.

So that had been my background. I had no experience in actually being a marketer, a marketing practitioner, itself – so I didn’t know how to decide what a good ad was or anything like that, but I was asked by the CMO at this time to lead a global marketing upskilling programme because I was in marketing ops and, as you know, a lot of ops teams, they just get thrown the thrown the project, right, and just go figure it out. So that’s what happened. We had never done anything like that before. I knew nothing about learning and development at this time. And so, I said ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll take this on.’ And because my background is in research and solving the problem, that’s kind of where my head immediately went. And so I tackled it like a social scientist – you know, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? Let’s go gather the data and then we’ll build the solution from there.

I had no idea at the time that I was doing a transformation initiative. I didn’t know what change management was, never even heard of those words. So, I just did what I already knew from having worked with product managers and product marketing for most of my career at that point. And I said, ‘I’m delivering a product. This upskilling programme is going to be a product.’

So, the very first thing I did was confirm with the CMO: What are we trying to do? What is your success criteria? And she basically confirmed that she wanted to elevate the capability of the marketing organization globally as a means to be able to accelerate our leads, because we were having an issue at the top of the pipeline. We needed to feed more things into the pipeline so that the conversion rate that was happening on the sales side could then lead to the outcomes that the board and the street were expecting.

So, I think framing it in that way, immediately thinking about it as a product and then approaching it as a research problem, really understanding what are the outcomes, then taking the time to go and diagnose what the market needed, what did those employees need, have those conversations and then connect with them as we were building and developing that programme, that’s where this idea of you got to think about your audience, you have to connect with them with where they are, and then you tune over time, that’s kind of where the ACT came from. And I just picked it up from there – and ironically, I had no idea I was doing change management until years later. I want to say maybe eight years later, when I was at Visa and I was going through a Prosci certification and sat back and went, ‘Huh, I’m doing change management.’ I’ve been doing this, but I’ve just been doing it from this perspective instead of like a project management-type perspective, which tends to happen a lot in the in the change space.’

Nancy
Absolutely. I would love to start to unpack each of those pillars with you. And, you know, if you’re open to using the Visa AI transformation story as a backdrop to help add gravitas to this approach, that would be phenomenal.

Stacey
Sure, so let’s start with Audience. The key problem that we’re looking to solve for in the audience is that the messages aren’t necessarily speaking to the employees. And I hear this all the time from both when I was at Adobe and at Visa, and when I speak with people who are in the transformation space. You hear all the time from these colleagues: ‘These messages, they’re not set in my context.’ ‘They’re not understanding what I’m dealing with.’ ‘They’re too generic.’ They’re very top-down.’ And the reason this happens is because we treat our employees as this homogeneous group. And a marketer would never do that. A marketer would absolutely take the time to segment their customers and really think through what do we need to do to build value. What is the value proposition that’s going to appeal to my various segments who were all buying tennis shoes? They’re going to have different reasons for why they want to buy this tennis shoe. Or, if we want to take a technology example, we could say why they want to, you know, subscribe to this particular service or buy a particular software.

So, thinking about it from an audience perspective when you look at your employees, it does the exact same thing; it kind of does this unlock. And I see this mistake made all the time where they treat everyone homogeneously instead of thinking through what’s going to matter to different people. So if we take AI as the backdrop, the thing with AI is that AI doesn’t work the same. Like generative AI, the use cases are not the same. And so if you just say ‘Go forth and use this new chatbot,’ the barrier to entry is so high because they don’t know how to use it. So, in this case, make sure you’re segmenting your audience and really understanding what it is that they care about and how are they going to use this?

So, you can segment in a lot of different ways. In our case, we really focused on role, but you can you can look at geography, you can look at function, you could look at level, you could look at generation. It depends on the initiative. But in the case of AI, I found role to be the most powerful. I have spoken with other transformation leaders as well and they’ve kind of come to the same conclusion that you want to look at people who are, let’s say, in sales. you want to look at QA and then developers as a different type of segment, then discern what is the value proposition for them? What are the use cases for them. And so, doing that work and really understanding your audience and what each of those audiences care about can then help you craft those messages.

And I can go a bit later into how you actually get to know the audience, but I wanted to move on to Connection, which is more about solving the fact that the messages actually don’t reach people, even though they might be well crafted. So, if you’re thinking about your audience, some of them are not on your Slack channel, your Teams channel, they’re not on Engage. Some of them barely look at their emails because they’re constantly with a customer or a client. Others only live in their email; others only pay attention if an executive is talking in a town hall. So you really need to make sure that you have a strategy for how you’re going to get all of those messages to people where they are.

So, this is all about delivering a message – crafting that right message for them, delivering it to where they are, through the channels that they trust – and you want to use a messenger that they actually believe in. So a lot of people think they’re doing a global programme and then they distribute their messages and they distribute everything through one or two channels and out to everybody. And they think that they are doing a global programme. But what that actually is, is a headquarters programme with the international distribution list. And you really want to make sure you have mechanisms to be able to get a message that matters through the channel with a messenger that they trust at a time when they need it. And so that’s what connection is all about and that’s the problem it’s trying to solve.

And then with Tuning, I like to say that this is actually solving the ‘launch and leave’ problem, which is very common with digital transformations or any kind of technology deployment – and you’re nodding your head, right! – so this is, you know, people basically do all the work to get it out and then ‘Huh, the work is done!’ And I would argue that actually when the work starts is when you’re deploying.

And when we think about, you know, the famous stat that everybody in change and transformation talks about, that 70% of transformations, you know, fail to realize their intended outcomes. And then people say change is hard. Well, I wouldn’t say ‘No, change isn’t hard.’ It’s just that we’re not doing the tuning at the right time. We don’t stay involved long enough to continue to listen to that feedback. And a lot of times we just stop at the 30-day mark. Maybe we stay to the 90-day mark. And what we really need to do is stay much, much longer. So, in the case of the GenAI programme, a lot of the tuning was done through the influencers, the network of people that we had established to help us with that connection point. We had people all through the organization who were there to help us with communicating those messages in a way that mattered and was local and relevant. And then they were helping us to feed back those messages so that we could tune constantly. And this then avoided the need to have to do a bunch of surveys or take months to eventually figure out what was going on.

Nancy
And in a lot of organizations, they’ll call the influencer group ‘a champions network’ or something similar to that. And so, talk us through your approach for nurturing a group of influencers inside of a large organization like Visa. And not only things like how you recruit and brief them, but also any sort of support guardrails that you put in place to help steer the success of this kind of group.

Stacey
Absolutely. One thing I wanted to call out that I have found is incredibly helpful if you want to create this influencer network or change champions, if you want to call it that – and for me personally, I don’t like to call them change champions because their role isn’t to amplify your broadcast, their role is to bring the reality of what’s happening locally in the relevant context. So, they’re not really championing the change as much as they are helping to drive the change. And just let’s take actual, true, real influencer marketing. So if we’re really thinking about someone who is on Instagram and that brand has provided them those products, and they have said to that influencer, ‘Here’s some key things we want you to highlight’ as you’re evaluating, as you’re wearing our clothes, as you’re using our perfume, our face products, whatever it may be – these are a few things that we want you to highlight. So that is a set of information that they have been provided. The reason why it works is because then they tell the reality of what’s going on. Yes, they’ll highlight those two features, because that’s what they’re going to get paid to do, and then they’re bringing that truth to the audience. So that’s what you want your influencer group to do.

So how do you get that? The first thing that I would say to people if you’re not already doing this, is that the most valuable thing you could do to really understand your audience is to constantly be connected with your audience, so having that ongoing relationship. A marketer doesn’t decide to go out and do their ethnography study the day that they are deploying the new tennis shoe. They’re doing it on an ongoing basis so that they’re able to actually identify before the tennis shoe is even made who is going to like that tennis shoe and what value proposition is going to get them to actually click on the buy button, or even buy two pairs or a second pair. So, the way you do that is you stay connected with your audience at all times. This pays off in spades. I hear all the time from change practitioners, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to do that.’ But it’s one of those things of like you put the effort in the beginning, you get the huge return.

So, for me, I’ve made this an ongoing practice; one-on-ones all the time with people. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, maybe even more, because of that history and the social science. So, making sure you’re doing one-on-ones, building those relationships because now you’re understanding what’s going on all around the company, what matters to people. Then use those relationships to sit in on town halls, listening to key meetings that are happening that you maybe aren’t part of because you’re not part of that team. And that qualitative information that you’re constantly getting is going to help you understand that audience.

And then the other is really, if you can, the richness of the data of your employee survey is a gold mine. And I have found that if you can make that relationship, establish that relationship with the people who do the employee survey, help them understand how you’re going to be using that data, they will make that available to you.

And so I share all that as a backdrop because one of the ways you can build a really strong influencer network is through those relationships. That is one way, because then you could start to ask those people that you know who are some good people who might be able to influence, let’s say, the legal team that is in Asia? Who’s a good person there? So you can leverage your network to find people. And that works, I think, really, really well if you have like a smaller deployment; maybe you’re doing something where you’re deploying a new sales methodology to the sales organization, or maybe you’re deploying some kind of new product delivery. So you’re not impacting the entire enterprise. What I found specifically in the AI space, for GenAI specifically, the going out and finding people in the network is just not pervasive enough – and so, for that, the key way to set up that group of people is kind of twofold. One, absolutely you need to engage the senior leaders. I have yet to see people be able to get full horizontal adoption of GenAI without the engagement of senior leaders. I’m talking about like the P&L owners. So executives, yes, you definitely need them, but I’m really talking about the one click down. So we’re talking about the P&L owners. And the best way, from my experience, to then create your influencer network is to identify who is the person within each of the P&L owners’ groups who has existing credibility, who has some influence, who has already exposure to the group and can act as that Instagram-type influencer because these people already trust and believe that person. So you build the group using those P&L owners who help you then identify those individuals. And then to amplify that, if you have had a successful pilot, or if you have multiple pilots, certainly leverage those individuals as well, because they’re raising their hand. And I find that the people who have done the pilots can kind of help you accelerate the identification of use cases. They can help you accelerate demo programmes. So I would use them in a different way. They’re not necessarily your influencers; they’re more your trainers or the people who can help you develop your content is the way that I would use them.

And then lastly, going back to that Instagram example, right? The brand provides them the actual product and then provides them, you know, ‘Here’s a set of some things that we want you to point out,’ but they don’t give them a script. So, with the AI programme, taking that same philosophy, where you have a set of core content, you can really control to make sure that you have a consistent narrative. So, here’s our value propositions; here are some slides that you can use that are kind of reiterating the core use cases; here’s the slides that make sense for your type of function; here are some posts that you can do on your newsletter or in your channel, like in your social channels, depending on what you want to use. And then you make it relevant for what makes sense in your content, for within your context. Deliver it with whatever channel makes sense for you. Deliver it at the time that makes sense for you. But just do it within this two-month window. Because right now in the next two months, we’re focusing on just trying to get people to try it. And then maybe a couple of months later, the focus is we want people to start to use it with more sophisticated prompts. Maybe then in the next couple months, we want them to try a second tool. So you continue to build up over time, but you’re not fully scripting what they’re doing and that’s what creates the authenticity with the message.

Nancy
I’m really loving this idea of thinking about influencers versus uniquely looking at champions as you initially define them, because it makes me immediately think about how IKEA puts out furniture that people can build themselves. And over time, there have been influencers who started sharing their hacks for how they took a piece of furniture that was intended for purpose A, but they developed purposes B and C. And when you’re trying to look at integrating new ways of working in an organization, not just once at the time of a launch, but over time, this idea of understanding how influencers can repurpose capabilities inside of the organization to solve a multitude of challenges or opportunities, then really creates an environment that’s safe to experiment, to have conversation about it and then to promote shared innovation and, by extension, change in the enterprise. So that feels like a very powerful pivot and something for our audience to think about.

Anything special that you want to share vis-a-vis going to market, whether it’s from a channel standpoint, rituals that you drew from the Visa experience and launching generative AI, that are worth bringing in to this moment of discussing influencer marketing for the enterprise?

Stacey
One thing that I found to be really remarkable and quite interesting in the GenAI programme was just the degree of engagement from people who were in the markets. I have found that the people who sit in the markets, they tend to be the ones that will adopt things more quickly, if you’ve done your audience work properly – so, if you’ve crafted that value proposition in a way that feels very real for them and is in their context, they’re much more likely to join because they already have that ‘outside in’ kind of ‘audience-first’ perspective. They already know that you need to meet the customer where they are because they live within the environment of the customer. So, what I have found, and in particular for when we’re thinking about the influencer market, is that the market-facing employees were the most impactful influencers for the whole organization; that they were the first to adopt. And helping us identify some of those really cool use cases like client prospecting, improving your proposals, post a quote – you know, getting through and doing all of your research on what the history was with a particular client, getting that information out of your CMS – those were really valuable use cases that could immediately hit the bottom line, so immediately you could see that you’re either moving faster or you’re doing something with less effort or you’re able to deliver higher quality.

And as a result of that, we had these amazing use cases that they were excited about and they wanted to talk about. And so we turned them into short little talking head videos and made them available through more of the mass broad channels. Now, the sales folks may not be the champion for some of the people in your audience. They may find that it’s the technology team who is saving tons of time because they’re having the AI use the code. Now, we experienced that as well, but they weren’t necessarily as ready to vocalize that, whereas the sales organization is. So, if you can engage and embrace the people who are in the markets, they can have a profound impact on really getting the adoption out, especially when you’ve got those smaller offices where it’s harder to reach everybody. If you can get people in the markets to be very excited and talking about this, they become very strong influencers for you.

Nancy
And I want to come back to this idea of outcomes – and this ties back to the start of our conversation and the idea of treating these transformation initiatives as product over project. And I know that as part of the story that you share vis-a-vis bringing generative AI into adoption at Visa, that you had a 98% adoption rate. And I know that’s a starting point for a conversation. Tell us a little bit about how you got people to focus on outcomes first, and what were some of the business outcomes that were prioritized along with this adoption milestone?

Stacey
Absolutely. I’d be happy to share that with you. And just to kind of clarify or to bring to attention that 98% adoption is something that we had shared externally during my my tenure at Visa – so I just wanted to put that caveat there since I’m no longer with Visa.

Nancy
Of course.

Stacey
So, one thing when you’re thinking about the outcomes – and it’s really important to think about GenAI in this way because then it starts to influence what the outcomes actually are – is that this is a human capital transformation. And I’m starting to see more and more people realizing that this is not necessarily a digital transformation, certainly not a technology rollout; this is a human capital transformation. And so, because of that, what your focus is on is shifting the behaviour and the mindset of your entire employee base simultaneously. So that’s a tremendous amount of change that is happening. But if you’re thinking about it that way: that at the end of the day what you’re trying to do is shift the way all of your employees are thinking and how they’re behaving, then you start to look at framing it as that we need to deploy something that is actually going to get them very excited and also increase their well-being and their overall sentiment. So yes, even in the work that I’ve done in GenAI, productivity and realized savings are the business outcomes you want at the end of the day, you can’t get there unless you have homogeneous, full-on horizontal adoption.

Nancy
Stacey, I’m curious to know what your thoughts are relative to guiding leaders around measurement. We know that at some points there can be high failure rates with generative AI in the pilot stages and so if you had to recommend three measurements for organizations, for change leaders who are making their way through generative AI programmes, what should they start focusing on tomorrow in order to make better informed decisions to support and enable people or the human capital impacts that we were talking about a moment ago?

Stacey
If they are having quite a few failed pilots – and I have been hearing that a whole bunch of pilots are failing – then the issue is probably not the technology. It probably has something to do with the fact that you’re not really measuring the human side of adoption.

And so a couple things that people could start right away, especially if they’re having failures of pilots: Interview five people who are using it and five people who are not, and just focus within your organization. And that contrast of what those five people who are using it say and what the five people who haven’t been using it say is going to give you most likely the answer for what’s happening. It could be that you might be having an awareness issue. You might find out that those five people are like, ‘Wait, what? I’m supposed to be using what?’ Or maybe it’s a capability issue. ‘I don’t even know how to get started.’ So then now you know you need to do something around prompts. Maybe you need to create a prompt library. Or maybe you’re hearing, ‘I don’t want to demonstrate that this thing can do my job.’ So then now you’re needing to deal with that true threat that a lot of people have so you need to reassure them that by using this particular solution, it’s not going to eliminate their job. Maybe it’s going to help us be able to deliver more output with the same number of people, so, like, shifting that value proposition.

Now, if interviews are not your thing – and I’ve been doing interviews since I was 20 years old, so it’s very easy for me to think about interviewing, but I know it’s not everybody’s thing – another way you can get the same kind of information is by generating and creating a simple feedback channel. So you can do that by having a generic email box, or you could start to dedicate and set up time at the end of one of your, let’s say, monthly town halls, for example .You could set up and have an ‘Ask me anything’ or you know, psych safety, free time – and you have a 5- or 10-minute conversation specifically about some of the wins that people are experiencing with GenAI, and then also potentially what some of the challenges are. Right away that would help them understand some of the barriers. Without having to do a big survey, without having to spend a lot of time, you can get those answers very quickly.

Then I would start to look at the utilization data. So what a lot of people don’t realize, or haven’t really thought about, is that especially with GenAI, all this data is sitting in either your Microsoft Graph or it’s sitting in your Google stack, but you have access to rich, rich data. So, partner with a data scientist in your organization who can help you pull the usage data. You want to look at how many unique logins do you have, how many repeated logins do you have? How many sessions are they doing in a week? You could start to look at how many different tools are they using? So you could start to get a sense if you’re getting that repeat usage. And so the very first thing you want to look at is adoption velocity – because I know you asked me for three measurements.

So, first identify your barriers through that qualitative, then use your system backend data to first look at your adoption velocity. So you want to see fast adoption velocity. And if you start to see it taper off but you’re not yet at 90% usage – let’s say you’re only at 35 or 40% usage – then that would trigger for you the need to go and do some phone calls with people or start to do some of those sessions in your town hall to get a sense of why the velocity tapered off. But once you have that fast adoption velocity and you’re at that 90%, maybe even at 80%, then you could shift and start to look at your repeat usage because that’s what’s going to start to see that sustainment of behaviour.

So that’s number two. And then the third thing we look at is really understanding how your programme is doing. It is remarkable the number of times that I will talk to people in this space and they’re like, ‘I can’t do a survey, so I can’t tell if people are aware’ or if they’re using Prosci’s ADKAR, which is a phenomenal model. But that’s a lot of work to have to do a survey to find out if people are in awareness or desire, etc. So, a way you can do that as a proxy is to look at your programme data. How many people have viewed a post that has been put on the internal social media? How many people have downloaded a quick start guide or visited the prompt library? How many people attended or watched a training session? These kinds of metrics can give you really good indicators as a proxy of whether or not your people are engaged. And so if those numbers are low, if you’re not seeing people do that, then you know your connection is broken. Now you know your messages are not getting to the people through the right channel with the right messenger. And so you can tune from there to determine ‘Oh, we have to change either the channels we’re using’ or ‘Let’s go and validate, do some interviews, maybe our message is wrong, and we can make modifications from there.’

Nancy
It’s a powerful set of metrics and certainly something that I think our listeners will put into practice.

We’re coming close to the end of our time together and we’ve really travelled across a wealth of insights that you’ve had to share. In closing, if you had to either share a final reflection or call to action with makers of change and change-makers, what would that be?

Stacey
Here’s the thing that I would say. So one, focus on this as a human capital transformation and not a tool rollout. Don’t focus on you’re rolling out ChatGPT 5 or you’re rolling out Copilot this, Copilot that. Those are your features that you are rolling out over time. Instead focus on the large outcomes that you’re trying to achieve. Now I know CEOs want the realized savings; they want the productivity uplift. I hear it all the time. They’re reporting they got 20% productivity uplift. I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers, they’re probably using it within one little function. So, as you’re working your way up there, build up your outcome metrics over time. The key thing is you can’t get to that productivity and realize savings until you have people who are using vertical AI solutions within a specific process or value chain. That’s where you start to see people moving faster or delivering greater quality or being able to do things with less effort. But in order to get there, you have to have ubiquitous adoption horizontally. So focus on driving that adoption velocity and getting the repeat usage so that they’re comfortable. Then you can start to introduce those vertical solutions that are tied to very specific processes that have a lot of manual work and really are ripe for an AI solution. So that’s where I would say to start – and then just hopefully build your executive-level OKRs or goals, align it.

So year one, focus on adoption and a little bit of repeat usage. Then year two, you want to do multiple solutions – so now they’re starting to do horizontal and maybe a vertical AI solution. And then maybe in year three, now you’re looking at true reduction in operational debt. You’re looking at true realized savings. You’re able to grow with your same staff, whatever it might be. But don’t expect to be able to do that right after you introduce Copilot or right after you introduce a chatbot to the organization. You’re not going to get that productivity uplift until you have the vertical solution supporting the horizontal ones.

Nancy
And just to support that story, what DWG members often hear me talk about is the idea that you have to crawl before you walk and run.vSo you’ve just taken us through a measurement arc of maturity that builds from strength to strength. And so I thank you for that.

Stacey
It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Nancy
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