How to lead your team's successful AI adoption

Learn new strategies for driving your team's AI adoption: put the right incentives in place and ensure your team feels that their judgment is valued.

Before You Start

Goal: Leave with new strategies for leading your team's AI adoption, including how to put the right incentives in place and ensure your team feels that their judgment is valued. If you don’t manage people, try using these approaches with your peers or your own manager.

Watch: Ethan Mollick on the Five Rules of Great AI Leadership — Wharton professor Ethan Mollick has spent years researching how people work with AI. Members are encouraged to watch beforehand, but a quick recap at the meeting works too.

Meeting Agenda · Approx. 60 mins

  • Member Updates · 10 mins
  • Icebreaker · 10 mins
  • Key Takeaways · 5 mins
  • Activities · 20 mins
  • One Action · 10 mins
  • Wrap-Up · 5 mins

👋 Member Updates · 10 mins

Go around your Circle and share personal updates. Keep them brief and focused on significant changes or important decisions since the last time you met. It's OK not to have one every month. If you have a One Action update from last time, share that too.

🧊 Icebreaker · 10 mins

Invite everyone in the group to share. Keep answers to one or two minutes per person.

Think of someone you consider a strong leader in the AI era right now. What do they do especially well?

🔑 Key Takeaways · 5 mins

  • Scaling AI takes three things: leadership, lab, and crowd. This is Mollick's model: leadership is the C-level actively deciding what incentives will encourage AI use; the "lab" is a small group of AI-savvy people who test and refine ideas; the "crowd" is everyone else.
  • Organizational change works best when employees have a say. — Leading AI adoption is like any type of change management: Employees will embrace it with more enthusiasm and commitment if you seek their input and treat them as valued contributors.
  • Employees need incentives to use AI, and to share how they're using it. As with any business goal, your team needs incentives to adopt AI and to use it transparently, so you know how it's being used, and everyone can learn from one another.

🏋️ Activity 1 · 10 mins

Build Your Leadership, Lab, and Crowd

  1. Write down one or two people on your team who could be your "lab" — people already ahead of the curve on using AI, who you can turn to for advice on your team's AI adoption strategy. Plan to connect soon and meet with them regularly.
  2. Write down some outcomes or solutions you'd like to get out of your team's AI use. You can share these goals with your "lab" and ask for input.
  3. What would incentivize your team to use AI for these outcomes? E.g., could you ask your team to report on specific AI wins each week? Write down your ideas.

Discuss as a group:

  1. What made you choose the "lab" members you wrote down? What do you hope to learn from them once you connect?
  2. Share the outcomes you're seeking from your team's AI use, and share the incentives that would help make them a reality.
  3. What other steps are you considering to support your team's AI use?

🏋️ Activity 2 · 10 mins

Show Your Team Where Judgment Still Matters

  1. Identify the major decisions or tasks on your team where human judgment remains essential, even as AI use grows — navigating client conversations, managing stakeholders, making ethical judgments, or fine-tuning creative work.
  2. Draft one or two sentences you could say directly to team members that state plainly where their judgment will keep mattering, so AI adoption doesn't read as a signal that they're replaceable.

Discuss as a group:

  1. Which tasks or decisions did you identify as needing human judgment most, and why?
  2. Read your draft sentences to the group. Do they land as reassuring, or do they need refining?
  3. Would you put your list of "human judgment" areas in writing and share it with your team — or go further and invite them to help define which tasks belong to AI and which belong to human judgment? (Research from The Effective Change Manager's Handbook shows that transparency and early employee involvement reduce resistance and speed the adoption of new ways of working.)
  4. What's one way you'll signal that human judgment is valued this month — a specific mention in a 1:1, a callout in a team meeting, or something else?

🎯 One Action · 10 mins

Commit to one concrete action — big or small — you'll take before next meeting. Go around the Circle and share (1 minute or less per member). Vocalizing it helps hold each other accountable.

Before next meeting, have a conversation with a "lab" member on how best to use AI or put in place one incentive to steer your team's AI use.

📅 Wrap-Up · 5 mins

Before you break, plan your next meeting and close on an energetic note. Go around your Circle one by one and finish the sentence:

Now I am feeling… (choose one word).

  • Set the day, time, and location
  • Choose the next topic or resource
  • Confirm who's leading the discussion
  • Decide how you'll stay in touch in between