Almost every company I work with has an AI champions program or is thinking about setting one up. They tap a cross-functional group of enthusiastic people who love AI to volunteer to help, they run a few Lunch and Learns. But then the whole thing fizzles out.

I made this mistake early on at UserTesting. I was putting too much focus on the top-down, bottom-up model of transformation, executives and individual employees, and not enough on the managers in the middle who actually carry adoption across teams. And when we first built a champions program, we treated their contribution too much like it was volunteer work.

Then a couple months ago I had a conversation with Jonathan Goldberg about this topic. Jonathan is the VP of HHX, the innovation division at Howard Hughes. Their champions program had also taken numerous forms over the last two years. They started by promoting power users and giving them recognition. But it wasn't enough. 

So they built the Aviators Program. Now Howard Hughes pays their champions, ties it to career growth, and puts people on a pedestal for what they achieve. As Jonathan told us at Become a Head of AI in a Day last week: "People are survivor-thrive beings. You want to go to work, get paid, and take care of your family. The company has to recognize what they're asking people to do."

Howard Hughes is three years into their AI journey now. They've rolled Glean out to the entire company, they have teams building agents that handle things like contract template selection and morning briefings, and over 200 people are actively sharing wins in a company-wide channel. 

And they're at the point where AI is no longer optional. As Jonathan said, "This is a tool just like the computer, just like the internet, that organizationally we have decided is going to be critical to our ability to grow and expand." You don't get to mandate something across an organization unless the foundation is there, and their champions are a big part of what achieved it.

After that conversation with Jonathan, we reframed our AI Champion model at UserTesting to put a greater focus on meaningful incentives. Caring about AI doesn't mean people are going to sustain the effort without real recognition. McKinsey research backs this up: companies that tie financial incentives to transformation outcomes see nearly 5x greater total shareholder returns.

Pay them, promote them, put their work in front of leadership. Give your champions a real incentive to keep showing up, and you will move AI from something people try to something teams rely on.