Hey friends,

I walk into a lot of organisations. Some of them have big budgets. Some have boardroom AI strategies with Gantt charts and steering committees and all the governance you could ask for.

But the first thing I actually look for when I step through the door? The weird one.

You know who I mean. The person who won't stop talking about Claude, or GPT, or whatever tool they found last Tuesday. The one whose eyes light up when you say "automation." The one who has probably already built three things nobody asked them to build, just because they were curious.

That person is your most valuable asset in the shift to AI. And most organisations either ignore them or accidentally suppress them.

I get paid thousands of dollars to walk into organisations and help them build an AI strategy, an AI operating system. My team has amazing consultants, trainers, developers. But here's what I've learned, over and over: the amount of transformation required to move an organisation into this agentic world is not possible from an external perspective alone.

We don't spend every day with your teams. We can set the direction, build the frameworks, train the people, and develop the tools. But we cannot make the cultural shift happen from the outside. We can support it. We can accelerate it. But the change has to come from inside.

So my first objective when I start working with any organisation is to find the AI champion. Sometimes there's one. Sometimes there are a few. Occasionally, there's nobody, and that's a much harder starting point.

This isn't a project with a start date and an end date. AI adoption touches every part of your business, from how you handle customer enquiries to how your finance team reconciles invoices to how your marketing team writes copy. No external consultant can be present for all of that. The AI champion is the person who carries the torch through every corridor of the building, long after the consultant has gone home.

My preference? You, as the business leader, play that role yourself. At the very least, you need to be close enough to it that you understand what's happening. But then you need more people in your team stepping into that role too. One champion is good. Three is better. Five across different departments is where real momentum starts.

There's a story that stuck with me. At Kodak, an engineer actually invented the digital camera. The technology existed inside the building. But leadership suppressed it because it didn't fit the existing business model. They couldn't see past the thing that was making them money today.

Think of your AI champion as that engineer. They're the person who sees what's coming, who's already experimenting with it, who keeps bringing it up in meetings even when nobody else seems interested. The question is whether you're going to listen to them or whether you're going to be Kodak.

What you want to do with this person is simple, but it requires a mindset shift. You want to listen to them. Let them talk about the experiments they're running. Give them space. Give them permission. Because this isn't really about the tools they're playing with. It's about the culture.

Are you building an organisation where curiosity about AI is encouraged, or one where it's tolerated at best? That's the real question. The tools change every month. The culture you build around experimentation and adoption is what determines whether your organisation moves with this shift or gets moved by it.

You might not need to hire anyone new. You might not need a massive AI budget or a consulting engagement right away. Start by looking around the room. Who's already obsessed? Who keeps bringing it up? Who built something without being asked?

That's your champion. Find them. Listen to them. Give them a seat at the table when you're making decisions about where AI fits.

The organisations that move fastest in this next phase won't be the ones with the biggest budgets. They'll be the ones that found the weird person early, and had the good sense not to suppress them.

See you next week,

— Aamir

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