Successful AI adoption within organizations requires a balanced approach, combining strong top-down strategic direction with a highly engaging bottom-up empowerment program that incentivizes and measures employee-driven innovation.
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Lee, what is your organization doing to drive
AI adoption internally?
Well, we have a program called AI for Us.
We just launched.
Thank you very much to BCG to help us doing it.
It's a top-down and bottom-up program.
So a year, a year and a half ago, we tried something top down.
It failed miserably.
Technology is easy.
The change journey is much harder.
So this time, we started out top down, bottom up,
and the bottom-up program has just been awesome.
So you guys helped us to really pull together an incentive program,
a measurement program, a marketplace for AI,
and then we just empowered the team. And it's been awesome.
We have over a hundred ideas every week coming up in the first few weeks.
And then we just take those and leverage them.
So that to me is like—the catalyst has been the bottom-up part of the journey.
John, what challenges are companies facing when
it comes to scaling AI?
A big part is what we were talking about is driving adoption and making sure that
you get that excitement on the floor for the people that are actually needing to
use it.
So designing a program that is really tailored towards that, that's a big deal.
Then the next piece is obviously getting into the technology transformation that
you sometimes also need to do to implement agents,
to implement AI technology.
And what we've designed here is making sure that all of the ideas that have
potential to be kind of bigger changes for the organization get the right level
of priority and the right level of staffing after it, but not to start with, right.
And many organizations make the mistake of starting top down, doing it big,
but also splintering and fragmenting their effort over many different
initiatives, which is just not getting to the ROI that
many organizations are looking for.
Yeah.
And top down, we have, basically we have three,
but really we have one initiative.
We're going to deploy agent space, and we're going to make it work,
and go from there.
And so by having that intense focus, I think is what's really helping us top down.
And then, you know, the excitement from the bottom up,
meeting that in the middle, that's where I think we're getting the
sweet spot.
Lee, what advice do you have for leaders who
are looking to drive bold change in tech?
A bit of carrot, a bit of stick works well.
So you know the carrot for us is the incentive we've got.
We just announced today the first Q1 award winners for the AI for Us program.
We'll do that every quarter.
We're going to run an AI summit at the end of the year.
They're going to fly 50 people to New York,
and they're going to have a great time with us kind of with all the things
they're doing.
So that's the kind of carrot and the excitement.
And I personally, you know, check everything they're doing,
and I'll connect with people individually.
So really leading from the top.
But the stick is also there.
So yeah, we've borrowed a few BCG measures,
should we say, to help us track progress.
So I can tell you that Google Cloud Consulting is the highest user of Gemini
in Google of any entity.
I know the percentage, I know the percentage of the others,
and I can track the progress we're making and those sorts of things.
So a bit of both is working well. But mostly in this in the AI space,
it's mostly carrot.
What innovations are you looking forward to?
There's a lot of new technology coming out every day.
So if anything, with agent space that we're implementing
together with Lee and his team, it makes it much easier to deploy agents
very quickly.
And I'm also excited about the ability for agents to collaborate—to work with
one another with MCP as a new protocol, agent-to-agent communication.
So what you do is you can unlock a lot of other systems to talk to each other and
agents to talk to each other using a lot of standardization that is now being
launched by Google and by other vendors, which is very exciting.
It really unlocks new opportunities.
I'd take all of that and then I'd plus on top of it.
So I think if you look at agents today, they're searching, they're understanding,
and they're acting.
The acting piece is the most exciting piece,
and it's the piece that's not quite there yet at scale.
When we get agents to act and, like you say, agent to agent to act,
it's going to be transformational in every organization that we work with.
So I'm that's the bit that really excites me is the act piece.
Thank you so much.
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