The Best AI Users in Your Company Are Working Alone

Turning individual experimentation into successful AI adoption

By Valeria Quintini

The problem

In most teams I work with, there is someone who has become very good at using AI.

They use it to pull together research, draft a report, and prepare for a client meeting.

Some others have their own automated flows and agents running every morning. They

save hours every week, and almost no one knows how they do it. A few desks away,

another team member is doing the same task the old way, at best pasting random

answers from ChatGPT.

Most companies have done all the right things: chosen the tools, paid for the licenses,

rolled out the training, run some pilots. Then they left it to individual teams, and ended

up disappointed with the results. Having the tools is not the same as using them well,

and one strong individual is not the same as a team that improves together.

So why does good AI work stay isolated, and often hidden?

• Sometimes it feels personal and improvised, a private habit rather than a method,

so it does not seem worth telling others.

• Somebody worries it will look like cheating. Some others become so proud of their

magic power that they do not want anyone else to have it.

• Some other people are unsure it is even allowed. It may run on a mix of corporate

and personal AI tools, so keeping it quiet seems the safer choice.

What actually works

Successful AI adoption does not come from another rollout or another training. It moves between people doing similar work.

In corporate and regulated environments, sharing has to cover the tricks as well as the

boundaries: what must be verified before it goes out, where AI cannot be trusted, and

how to check a figure or a claim before it reaches a client.

You cannot buy true AI adoption. It spreads between people. But someone has to set the conditions and start the cycle.

And of course teams learn faster when people can admit uncertainty and mistakes

without it costing them. A team that can say “I tried this and it was wrong” will learn

more than a team that sticks to “look at how beautiful and perfect all of this is”.

The leader as AI sponsor

None of it happens without a sponsor: a senior leader who takes ownership of AI for the team, makes it legit and gets it funded. It doesn’t need to be the most technical leader, as long as these four things are prioritized:

• Give AI an official role

• Set quality thresholds and owners

• Set the guardrails

• Promote adoption and sharing

The AI ambassador's job

The sponsor sets the conditions. Someone still has to carry the practice across the team, and that is the AI ambassador. It is often the person from the start of this piece, the one saving hours on their own. The isolated expert becomes the agent of change.

An AI ambassador uses AI openly on real work and turns what works into practice

others can reuse. They run the peer circles, spread genuine curiosity and passion, deal

with the pushback, and share the rules of engagement. The sponsor makes it legitimate. The AI ambassador makes it spread.

Where the AI coach comes in

You can build these conditions on your own, and many sponsors try. It tends to work

until the quarter gets heavy and the sharing stops, because the culture was encouraged for a while and never actually built.

This is where an AI coach helps, and it is not AI training. Training teaches the tools. An

AI coach combines leadership coaching, to develop how a sponsor sets direction and

holds a change, and AI coaching, to bring real judgment about what AI is good for and

where the risks sit.

Turning individual experimentation into successful AI adoption is not a program you

install. It is something you keep choosing, and an AI coach is how that choice holds. Somewhere in your organization, someone has already built their own morning agent,

and no one else knows. Right now it is one person's private advantage. Turning it into the way the whole team works is a leadership choice, and it is yours to make.

If you want to make it, let us start the work together.

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About the author: Valeria Quintini

Valeria Quintini is a TopLeader executive coach and an ICF-certified coach (ACC) with more than 30 years of international leadership experience in global technology and marketing, including VP and Senior Director roles at McAfee, Avast, Gen, Autodesk, and Sony. She holds certifications in AI Product Management and AI Product Strategy and works with leaders on the leadership side of AI adoption. She has coached more than 60 leaders across 30 countries.

Connect on LinkedIn or at vq-coaching.com.