How to help your team adopt AI
From Zero to World-Class AI Manager - part 8
“Ollie ran an energetic, fun, informative and practical session with lots of takeaways for how to make the workplace more effective and efficient. His session was a highlight of the collaborative leadership course.”
Shân Wareing, Vice Chancellor & CEO, Middlesex University
This is the final part of From Zero to World-Class AI Manager. If you’d like to discuss how I can help your team, book a free, no-obligation call HERE.
You’ve spent seven weeks building AI capability.
But personal productivity gains have a shelf life. If it stays with you, it dies when you leave - or just fades when you get busy. The real value comes from making it stick across a team.
This week is about how to share what you’ve learned without being that person who won’t shut up about AI. Oh, and how to know if any of this is actually working.
Why people hide their AI wins
Remember, there’s a reason your colleagues aren’t sharing what’s working.
Fear of being given more work. “Oh great, you finished early - here’s more.” Worry they’ll look like they’re cheating. Concern about judgment from people who haven’t started yet.
The fix isn’t mandating adoption. It’s making it safe to experiment, and creating lightweight ways to share.
How to share without preaching
Don’t: “Everyone should use AI!”
Do: “This saved me 3 hours on the quarterly report. Here’s how, if you’re interested.”
The difference matters. The first sounds like an edict. The second is an invitation. People adopt things when they see someone like them getting results - not when they’re told to.
Three ways to build momentum
Create a Slack or Teams channel for experiments
Not a channel where you broadcast announcements. A place where anyone can post “I tried this, here’s what happened.” Low stakes. Failures welcome. The weird output that made you laugh gets as much engagement as the polished workflow.
Build a one-page guide
This is your call to action from this series. Create a simple doc with:
3 use cases that actually worked for you
The prompts you used
What to watch out for (where AI gets it wrong)
How long it took to get good at it
Share it with 2-3 people who’d benefit. Ask: “Would you try this?”
That doc becomes the start of a shared prompt library. Others add to it. It becomes institutional knowledge that gets better over time.
Run a hackathon (the non-technical kind)
Get people from different teams together. Give them a real scenario - a client brief to respond to, a messy situation to untangle, a process to improve. A few hours. No coding required.
The goal isn’t to build something technically impressive. It’s to see what’s possible when you combine different perspectives with AI capability. And to make experimentation feel normal.
This is a great idea for your next away day, by the way.
Knowing if it’s working
Measuring this stuff is never going to be perfect. And let’s be honest, if you’re now using AI a bunch more, you’re probably not actually working less. That’s not really the point.
What’s more likely is that you’re doing more. Or doing different work, Or doing the same work but better. That’s harder to measure than “I saved 3 hours.”
But here’s one simple way to get a rough sense of time saved.
The mini audit:
For one week, spend five minutes at the end of each day noting roughly how long you spent on different types of tasks. Not just AI - everything in your work day (and maybe even your personal life). Don’t overthink it - just top-line categories and rough time.
Do the same thing a month from now. Compare.
You’ll see where time has shifted.
And you’ll notice something else: you become more intentional about what you’re actually spending time on. That’s valuable in itself.
What you’ve learned
Over the past eight weeks, you’ve learned what a workflow actually means, how to talk to AI like a colleague, how to fix your meetings, how to set up your AI to work better and faster, how to research without disappearing down rabbit holes, and how to use AI to think more clearly.
There’s plenty more to cover - agents, deeper automation, workflows that run without you. I’d love to hear what you want to read more of in 2026. Reply and let me know what would be most useful.
Thanks for following along.
Ollie
Catch up on the previous 7 weeks of From Zero to World-Class AI Manager here: