# How to Go from AI Power User to AI Leader — Transcript (2026-10-12)

https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-10-12 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614

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[00:00:00] Every group of professionals organized in any way you can imagine at this point has some subset of people that have become the power AI users. These are the folks who try every new model and every new product. They report back on what works and what others should do.

And in many cases, that role has been formalized into some sort of internal ambassadors or champions program In fact, across all of my experience with enterprises, the single highest ROI transformation activity that I have seen is when companies structure this sort of internal champions program well Today's episode is all about what that actually means

The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. first of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, [00:01:00] Section, Harbor, and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts

And to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai.

Lastly today, it is a federal holiday in the US today. So this was recorded last week. It's another one of our operators cut practical episodes, and I hope you enjoy it 

All 

right, 

Nufar, welcome back to 

another 

Operator's 

Cut. How are you?

I'm 

good. Thanks 

for having 

me. Excited 

about this one very much

Yeah, th- 

maybe just 

make a bold 

claim right 

up front, 

and 

and I 

have both individually and together 

spent a lot of time 

interacting with enterprises 

and companies of all 

shapes 

and sizes 

who are trying to get better at AI. And 

as 

part of that, we have tried 

and they 

they have tried 

a huge 

array of different 

strategies for improving how they use AI, 

You know, within specific 

teams 

or across the board.

And 

what 

what we're gonna talk about today 

is one of 

the 

only [00:02:00] consistently always successful 

ways 

to 

make the general experience 

that

people have with AI inside a company or inside a team 

better, right? 

It just, 

it 

it never 

fails is 

the short 

answer. This is just such a critical component 

of what people 

do, so I'm really 

excited 

to dig into it.

Introduce us to what you're doing

and then, I think we'll have a lot to talk about today. 

Perfect. 

Yes. 

So 

I agree. We're now presenting 

the, one 

of the highest ROI 

activities 

that you 

can take 

in a company in order to be 

successful 

with 

AI, and that 

is to establish a proper network 

of AI 

champions. 

And what 

I wanna do with 

the session today 

is 

the following, 

because 

we 

all use AI every 

day, and 

I'm sure that everybody has 

seen the same phenomena where someone on the team, 

Finds a great way to do something.

Often, those are the best users out there. They show 

to people, 

and then it never 

turns 

into something the whole team 

uses. And 

part of what this episode 

is trying to do is to help resolve 

[00:03:00] the problem, to 

help define the person. 

It might be 

you, it 

might be others in your 

company. 

their 

job is to fix that.

The person that helps 

spread, 

The AI. 

And I 

think that many 

companies have been establishing AI 

champions for a 

while 

now, 

With varied degrees of success, but always, 

in my opinion, with 

a positive outlook 

and outcome 

overall. 

My goal is 

to go over three 

things to help 

make it 

even 

better.

First of 

all what the 

role 

really is and how to define it, 

and may-maybe as a 

byproduct, 

to also help 

the question 

that maybe 

someone listening 

to this has with their self of 

whether they are already the 

underdefined AI champion in their environment, 

or maybe they should, 

Opt 

to 

become one.

I also want to, 

Explain 

how I believe we should establish a proper 

network of internal champions. 

And lastly, I want 

to, 

Discuss what the 

best AI champions 

in a given 

company, 



What they need to do.

And 

before we we dive in, I wanna add, 

Three 

things I think to this. 

First, I know you're [00:04:00] about 

about to give us your 

definition of 

an 

AI champion, but 

just on a naming convention, I wanna point out that 

a-across all these different teams 

that 

we've worked 

with, 

you've worked 

with, I've worked with, 

the 

name 

is, 

different for 

for this.

Sometimes it's evangelist, 

sometimes it's leader, sometimes it's adoption support. Champions is the 

one I think 

we've heard the 

often uh, variation on 

on champions. So, that's what we're referring to. It might-- You might-- 

have 

heard it 

differently or have it named differently in your team. 

the second 

thing is 

I 

think that for those of you who are not 

inside a 

big enterprise and are wondering, "Is this 

worth continuing to invest 

my 

time in for the rest of this episode?"

I would make 

a fairly strong argument 

that 

once you get past 

a basic or intermediate 

level, once you're in that advanced AI category, 

you are 

to be thrusted 

to 

to this role of champion 

in some way, shape, or form. 

It's 

gonna 

be for 

for your friends and family, 

the the very but it it also is likely if you 

are 

working with 

any number of people on a team, 

this 

role inhabiting the 

champion's role, 

it's 

a 

different 

[00:05:00] muscle than just using AI, 

but 

communicating how to use it well 

and 

thinking in terms where you 

can share what you're 

doing, 

Process 

terms basically rather than 

just 

implementation, I guess.



and third thing 

because Noufari wouldn't shout 

this out, 

don't think that 

that there are very many people 

who have 

done 

more 

versions of this with more 

different 

companies than Noufari. So this comes out of a lot of experience, and not just 

Hacking at home experience, but direct in-person, 



dozens and 

dozens of companies in different contexts in which this type of uh, work has been done. 

Thank you. Okay. I now have, 

a 

cross to bear, and that is to first define what it really is. as Nataniel said, in many cases, you already know this person. That's the person that you pick up the phone to whenever you want to know how to get something with AI done, or there is something new that is now accessible, and you wanna understand how to work with that.

And 

my definition is that AI champion is the person that the, in the team or 

in the environment 

that is responsible for moving AI [00:06:00] adoption and value forward. Often I call them peer plus one because they sit within the team, 

they 

do the team's work, but they're a step ahead in AI because they 

already are the person that are most psyched and able in AI, or they were appointed to this role.

So it doesn't matter whether this appointment was done officially or that's who you are de facto. I think that AI champions are people who show what AI can do on the work that the peers actually do. Not theoretical, but use cases from the day-to-day of their environment. They also connect with other champions, and in many cases, with the central AI teams or other professionals in order to 

build 

and use the relevant things the company offer.

And they also move people without necessarily having authority on them forward with their adoption. 

And 

before we go 

to the actual job the role does look quite different in different companies, so I wanted to give you a spectrum. 

[00:07:00] the spectrum is as Nataniel said, based on a lot of experience 

across multiple 

companies.

On the one hand, we have what sometimes companies will refer to as ambassadors. These are the best AI users. Their role is primarily to drive AI adoption, to showcase the use case. They will bring their real examples and they will do part of the work, as well as training their peers officially or unofficially in that case, by the way.

And they also know how to voice what the team needs, the tools and the internal builds that will help the team move forward with their adoption at the complete other end of the spectrum, we have what we're-- we can now call them an internal FDEs. FDEs stands for full deployed engineers, and many of you have probably been hearing this terminology for many years, so it's a bit loaded with many different interpretations 

because 

they've 

been in here, 

a-around 

for a 

while.

But now many of them are very much focusing on AI. so I'm gonna define it quite simply in our context as a [00:08:00] professional builder who sits inside a business team and builds what the team needs. Uh, it can be all the way from idea to production, including, as we will discuss in the second part, the planning, the value realization.

Some of them come from software and AI background. Some of them, and I've seen many of those, were subject matter experts who made real career pivot into building for their teams with the many amazing tools that now many people can build with. In between, uh, where many companies typically land, the ambassador builder.

So they also build for themselves and for their immediate team. they typically will have a well-defined scope of what they can and cannot do, or they should have one. and beyond 

that scope, 

they will be almost like a product, 

uh, manager. 

They will gather the requirements. They will bring them to the relevant either vendors or internal teams that can help them build properly what 

want.

so with the definition out of the 

way, let's 

talk about the how-tos. And the how-tos for AI champions, they're comprised of two parts. We [00:09:00] have part one, which is the company side, how you build a champion network stage by stage.

And in part two is the champion side. And as we said, whether you're official or unofficial champion, what you need to know and how to do the job well. And I think that the second part especially will be applicable to all of you super users who just want to also progress some of what they do and their thinking.

So of course, if you are a sponsor, the very first part is the playbook for you starting with the company side. And I think that whenever a company is talking about AI champions they never just ask a single question. They basically ask four questions. Many of them are not necessarily just related to champions.

It's just that when you start thinking about how can I create, a internal movement towards a better adoption, often these questions come to play. So the first question they often ask is, "Who gets to build?" And that's basically the democratization question. 

Who 

uses 

[00:10:00] what others are building and who's the one that is building for others and themselves?

The second question is, "What do we expect from everyone 

else?" Because 

champions have a job, and so does everybody around them, all the other users. So it creates a lot of questions around expectations from regular users versus champions. They also often ask, "How does AI spread from the field?" Meaning how people in the ground pick up 

a, 

a way 

that works whatever was built for them.

And lastly, "How do the champion work with the central teams or the vendors?" 

And by that, I mean, the people who own the company's AI tools, a- and the IT and the security, and everybody else that makes the decision. And even if nobody in your company has the title of central teams, you are living with these questions because, these are like the, the core things that differentiate between a company that is very opinionated to the ones that are still kind of asking a bunch of questions.



let's 

go to process of establishing an AI network. [00:11:00] 

I 

think the very first question that I always like to ask companies is, " what are you planning to accomplish by establishing an AI champion network?" And very often they struggle to answer. And then the second question that maybe I'm, I'm asking on the line between the ambassadors that we've seen to the full builders the full deployed engineers, " Where do you want your champions to be?"

This 

one 

usually 

opens the conversation because now we're talking about something more concrete. What these people will be allowed to do, what they'll be expected to do, and what stays within central teams or only professional vendors and builders. 

And 

even if you've been defining champions for a while, that's an important discussion to have periodically 'cause sometimes that changes for companies, 

and 

you might have refined your thinking based on actual experience with democratization and building in, on the ground.

when you 

want to start well, I want you to configure the goals, the responsibilities, and the expectations, ideally written down and agreed with [00:12:00] everybody else who is involved, like IT, security, and so on. To give a concrete example, one company that I'm working with, after pondering these questions for a while, 

they realized 

that primarily 

what they want is 

their champions 

to be a good funnel that brings the relevant use cases from the ground to the central team that is basically blind to the day-to-day reality of the different teams.

and as such, it's a completely different, 

discussion 

and role and training 

for people whose main purpose is to basically become a funnel for good use cases coming from the team. 

On the flip side, I've also seen companies that change their mind after a while and then realize that they want to have champions as full-blown builders, and then they train them to become much more sophisticated almost like the, the AI engineers they 

breed from the ground up.

So that's the, the stage one. Stage 

is the 

the nomination. And there are three signals that I want you to look for very first in a good champion. a good champion [00:13:00] is a person that are among the most sophisticated AI users without being told to use AI they just do.

Uh, 

Their peers already come to them to ask questions and to get guidance, and their managers will actually give them enough time 

to 

work on AI also for others, and that's a big one 'cause often that's 

when 

great 

nominations fall short. Then there are other things like the ability for them to influence without authority, knowing the business ins and outs taking initiative, and a lot of curiosity because, as we know, everything changes all the time.

I want you also to remember that like, the person that you will nominate is a person that you want to retain and promote because getting to be the AI champion and then boasting on that on social and so on is a huge perk, and also makes this person highly desirable for the market.

So make sure that you nominate the people that truly deserve the role. This is also the area, the nomination, where I've seen companies making endless [00:14:00] amount of mistakes, and I did wanna call them out because they are so common that I will be amiss if I will not call them out. the First thing that I'm seeing is very senior people nominating themselves just because they want to improve their AI skills, so they say, "I'm gonna be the AI champion," or because they want to have influence on what's being built, so they nominate them- themselves.

Senior people should sit in an AI committee, like a dedicated steering function that helps make the strategic decision. They shouldn't be the people who are chartered to build and train their peers. I've also seen 

that's very common, 

great candidates in terms of their AI ability and everything else falls in place, except they're also the busiest people on the team, and they just don't have the bandwidth to be the person who builds and trains and so on.

So they are not a good use of your time. I've also seen people no- nominated as a reward. they are strong players, let's nominate them as AI champions, but they're just not good, 

uh, enough 

AI users or doesn't hold some of the other traits. And lastly, never nominate the person who [00:15:00] just started working yesterday.

One of the most important traits that the AI champion has is the ability to identify use case and know the business ins and outs. If they don't know, they're new to the team, they will not be a good enough champion

Okay.

The next thing that every company that is serious about champions need to do is the training. And of course, you can run it internally if you have strong enough people. You can do a more concentrated bootcamp, which is what I often I get to do, or you can go gradually and just train them.

But even if they are great users, ideally, you should train them on specific s- things, namely part of what I will share in the second part. 

In my 

point of view, whichever format you choose train them on their own work. And my favorite test is very simple. Every champion takes one real use case from their team and shows, 

How 

they were able to build or promote it by the end of whatever training that you do.

If they can do that, they're ready. If not, maybe there is some more work to be done. And [00:16:00] usually, this stage of the training ends with a kickoff 

or some kind of a certification. A lot of excitement across everybody. Uh, People are very proud to have been chosen, and that's where the real test begins, and that's where many of the initiatives fail because 

the 

biggest predictor of whether this succeeds is what happens the day after you certify someone as a champion.

And this is where we start talking about communities or networks and it needs several things. I think one of the most important thing that 

a successful 

endeavor like that needs is a sponsor. Ideally, two kinds of sponsors. One that is more of the community type coming from HR or the people team or anyone who knows how to run a community inside an organization effectively.

They keep the people side alive. But we also want a professional sponsor, the one who works closely with the chief AI officer 

if you have one. The one that is very savvy about AI that can also steer the direction of the champions towards the [00:17:00] company's AI adoption strategy. This person will set the priorities and will bridge to everyone that the champion depends on namely all of these internal teams.

And they keep the champions on what matters and keep the company clearing the path for them, the approvals and the access and the tools and so on. so these sponsors matter a lot. and I think that to name an example, in one of the most successful companies that I've seen in establishing an internal network, they have a dynamic duo of an L&D expert and an AI expert working together.

They regularly keep their hand on the pulse. They regularly make sure that they understand where the champions sit, what they need, what they're building, what the state of the industry is, and always trying to bridge the gap. On the flip side, literally in every company where we might have had an amazing AI champion course that never materialized into business value, the missing piece was the continuation.

Nobody took ownership on making sure that the champions are being used [00:18:00] effectively and learning continuously. That means that most will just return to the way they used to work before and, 

uh, just to use 

AI as they used to work and not take it to the next level that we expect a proper initiative like that will take. 

One of the things that is interesting 

and 

and may be obvious to some but is not necessarily always obvious, is that I think a real challenge for enterprise decision makers is 

both how 

much to 

invest and the right way to invest in training their people with AI.

It doesn't 

fit comfortably into previous models of corporate upskilling because it's so much more 

robust and 

and all-encompassing, but at the same time, there's no established standards or clear 

practices really 

yet, that everyone agrees upon 

how 

to do this.

And because of all 

that, that I think makes the question of how much to invest in different categories of people really hard. 

This is, 

once again, one exception where 

[00:19:00] whatever training you can do for this group who is going to be then disseminating the most useful parts of that, the most 

contextually 

relevant 

for that business parts of that, 

just 

just an extremely high ROI category of training, even relative to other areas.

makes 

it a valuable place to intersect. 

guarantee that there are still 

lots and lots of companies out there that have yet to invest in any sort of formal training. If you're one of those, this is, I think, a place to potentially look as a good intersection and a good starting point. 

Yeah, I agree. 

and 

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Let's 

about 

the community 

because 

first thing that I will say that everything that is [00:23:00] true for any internal community is true here. You want routines, you want champions to meet regularly and make it easy for them to share the things that they're doing, to learn together, and to to get celebrated when they have interesting accomplishments based on what matters to you that they will do.

Another one that is underrated is to work with the champions' managers because what I often see is great champions whose managers don't have realistic expectations or don't know how to use them, or there is simply too big of a gap in the knowledge between the champion and the person who manages them, 

and then 

everybody is very 

frustrated.

So a short session, it 

be very short, 

to the managers of the champions to explain to them what the champions know, what they're expected to do, what-- like how to effectively leverage them 

creates 

a 

big 

difference in leveraging the output of the fact that you already established 

these champions.

And 

lastly 

about the day after, I think that not everybody who was nominated will actually become [00:24:00] champion either because they or their managers have a different expectations 

than 

than what they have or people might leave the work gets too busy, and some realize and I've seen that 

many, 

many times, the role is just not for them.

It sounded very good on paper, but they just don't wanna do that. 

so 

the network has to be a very living entity. it needs to, e-enable people to go and leave the network easily, and then they can hand it over to someone else in the team. we wanna make it easy for new people to join 

in 

a clear way, and education never stops.

So it's always happening. And if you already have a network and it's losing energy, this is where you start. Name your two sponsors. Check that every champion still have 

the one 

or two days or sufficient, 

capacity to 

do the 

work. And if needed, the commitment with their managers.

Also, let the people who can't do the work step out of the role and thank them, 

and nominate 

new people all the time. 

The most tired [00:25:00] networks that I see are missing one of these elements that I 

called out. 

So that's the company side the clear goal, the right people, the right training, and the day after that is also a living, breathing entity.

Let's move to the 

champion side. And here I'm also reverting to what you said at the beginning. Even if you're not an official champion, but you are the best AI user in the company or in your uh, environment, I think that you should listen to that because the, these things are what differentiate regular 

power user from one that is geared towards yielding more 

value 

So, 

a champion needs 

to know stuff that other employees not necessarily.

I think it doesn't matter if you are like a pure ambassador or you're a full builder. A champion needs to understand the whole road an AI use case travels all the way from idea to production, meaning something that people actually use every day. And I think that there are like three stretches.

Before the build, meaning that you know your [00:26:00] ground, you know what the company allows to do, and where the use cases reside. You also need to decide if, what, and how to build. 

Then you have the 

build itself from POC to production. How do you create the agent or the automation of the capability? and of course here the, proportion is based on the skills and how much you're allowed to build and what are the tools that you have.

and after the build, there is the entire part of the value realization, deployment, and retiring a solution when needed. So I wanna give you a few thoughts on each 

them. 

And these are like the main stops or the main things that a good champion should be able to do well. So does, by the way, a great power user.

So the first thing that I want you to hone in on is the use case identification. I want you to find the problems in your domain that are worth solving and where the, cost 

is 

justifying the money or the investment. and you have to be a little bit conservative here in the sense that assume that the investment will be higher than you anticipated and [00:27:00] the, that the value will not necessarily be as high in day one as you anticipated.

Your ability to 

to articulate who suffers from this problem, how often, and what done look like uh, really changes the picture. And then checking your idea that you have against what already exists so that the company build everything just one time and not 100 times of the same use case.

Another thing that I want you to pay attention to 

as 

a champion is the ROI. 

That's 

just being able to articulate what it worth versus what it costs. The core knowledge here as I said, is to be the realistic 

person. 

And it means that you need to ask a bunch of questions about how 

it, 

it will be used.

Does it move a company like a critical uh, performance indicator? what will 

it need to do in order to measure or, 

uh, make 

sure that we 

the goals? 

I 

also want you to be very focused as a champion on the deployment side. How do we make sure that this great thing that we've built is getting into the right people's hands frequently enough and with the [00:28:00] right usage mode?

There is a question of where does it live, who approves it, and who supports it in day two, not just day one, where everybody's excited. 

And 

lastly 

and that's a big important thing, the evaluation. How do you know that 

the stuff 

that you built is actually good? How do we know that we can trust it?

How do we know when we cannot trust it? How do we understand the risks of the mistakes? And I think it's one of the most important skills for any champion to be able to sign off 

on, is 

the thing good enough to put in the hands of users?

I'm 

reverting to 

to the definitions, and I wanna make it more concrete because for the same use case, the different types of champions might address differently. For example, maybe we have a use case where the team spends hours every week assembling a summary of a customer 

renewal, okay? 

The ambassador is primarily gonna spot the use case, describe it clearly, and make 

case.

This is what it costs us today. This is where I think it's [00:29:00] solvable. And then they will take it to a central team or a vendor as a very clean request that someone professional can execute. Once the solution is ready, then they make sure that the value is actually realized, that the team uses that properly.

So they're introduced at the beginning and at the end. The ambassador builder also will build the version that works for their own team inside the scope that the company allows them to build, and then perhaps a second team will take it over from them to fully productize, and then they, of course, they will need to be back, 

for the 

deployment.

And the internal FD, they can take it all the way, including the 

and everything else. 

Whichever your champion's role is configured of I want to give a few playbooks to make sure that the, 

the parts 

that they are doing will be done well and also this is relevant to other power users. 

Okay. 

so 

the 

first question that you should ask before anything gets built is whether or not you should even build that. And 

I think you'll be surprised how many times people don't even stop to ask, "Should we build [00:30:00] it?" They just go ahead and build. the thing that you need to check is how often does this come up?

Like, is it a, a concrete, uh, use case? How much does it worth? And how costly the mistake is. Because if the value and the error tolerance justify it, the decision will then be between reuse something maybe that is already e-existing, buying something, building, or maybe just adding it to the backlog for building in future state.

But I think there is such a huge bias towards building among individuals and companies that part of being a good champion is making these decisions from the grounded and the company connected point of view, not as a passion project, but something that justifies the investment

The 

second thing that I wanted to make sure that as a champion you pay attention to is what should it be? Because I think that nowadays we feel that everything needs to be an agent fully connected doing everything, and so on. And 

I believe 

that keeping it simple or building the simplest solution that solve the problem is the way to go.

So a 

good champion also has the mental model of [00:31:00] what's the right technology for the job. Sometimes it can 

a shared 

chat setup that is enough uh, like a prompt instructions and files that your team reuses. Sometimes a skill nowadays is the best way to do it, the the most streamlined way to create the playbooks that can run on demand, and sometimes it's an automation.

the same steps will be executed every time. Sometimes 

is a 

good 

justification for it to be a full-blown agent that you build for the team and so on. But that's not always 

case. 

I want you to start with the simplest one that solves the problem and identify that there is a tool justification to go, 

from 

left to right.

And we're not just building the most complex thing that we can think of only to be left with something very hard to 

build, 

maintain 

and test.

And lastly the last playbook that I wanted to make sure that the champions are kind of, being mindful about is 

defining 

the core properties before you start to build. So these are the, things that you probably need to write down as requirements or [00:32:00] as spec for what's being built. And each of them carries a lot of weight.

is it for? Everyone is not a good answer because anyone who has done any good UX knows that designing for everybody is designing for nobody. So be specific about the, the target audience. What it needs to know, and this is, 

the way, 

often when you discover that you have an entirely new projects to do just to curate the relevant knowledge for your... 

before you 

can even start executing the idea that you have in mind. I also want you to ask how people will use it 

so 

that it will actually be used and not a glorious vibe coded application that nobody remembers where, where the URL is, And what 

it must never, ever do AKA concrete and detailed guardrails.

Often, by the way, starting the thinking with what your solution must never do creates much more important clarity about what it should do. and then ask yourself who checks the output? Where do you enforce human judgment as part of the loop, and how do you balance business value and quality[00:33:00] or safety of what you're building?

And lastly, how do you know that it works? You want to configure the, use cases it needs to be tested against as early as possible because when you configure the use cases, often that surfaces 

critical conversations 

about edge cases 

how difficult 

it 

can be to evaluate them. 

And 

this also helps to build the right 

thing 

and also helps 

kill it 

before it's built because of the inability to ensure quality which is often the case.

So this 

is gonna be the file that champions will hand over whether they're handing it over to a vendor, to the central team, or even to themselves. 

Um, it's 

a critical practice 

do before. 

So I wanted to 

give you a glimpse 

of three questions that I think differentiate between a regular power user and a champion or a user that is very mindful about building the right thing in the right way.

I'm calling that often the builders or the champions

checklist. 

as we're wrapping things up I think that one more thing that I wanted to observe is that unlike many things in AI nowadays, 

[00:34:00] These 

playbooks 

are not as transient as some of the other 

things because 

the tools, they will change every quarter, and part of being a good champion or fostering a good champion network includes also teaching them the latest and greatest in tools and in building techniques or identifying use cases techniques.

But I deliberately spotlighted the things that remain valid even if the technology races forward 

you 

you will still 

need the right people with the time to do it. You will still need to decide where on the line they sit between ambassador and builder and write it down. They will still need to, 

get 

the whole road from idea to production, and somebody will still need to own the 

after.

So if all of these are done right by your champions, you are much better positioned to establish a, successful process. And if you are the champion themselves, these are one of the best seats in the company. I, I, can guarantee you because you see the problems across the team. You work with the teams, or you build it yourself, and you learn the beginning and the end of the roa- the road of building, while most people only [00:35:00] know kind of the middle of how to build 

the stuff in 

the middle.

And in order to help people do that properly, we are establishing an AI champions bootcamp. So, this is all very opinionated towards what we believe champions need to do. And we're starting quite shortly, so if you want to be a champion in your company, or you were nominated as a champion in your company, or maybe you are the sponsor who wants to send a bunch of your champions our way, we'll be very happy to train them on all of these and more.

Awesome. Um, 

so going back to the idea of how this role evolves and how it doesn't evolve, one really important context that I'm seeing more that's sort of been lurking for all year but is getting even more urgent now is it's a version of the internal FTE 

not 

not necessarily a technical person by definition, but is someone who's figured out how to start using code and agentic coding tools 

to 

solve some 

parts of their work or to do parts of their work.

[00:36:00] It's the best example, I think, right now for companies and people inside companies of 

the 

power and 

challenge of AI 

all, all at once. 

Obviously, it is incredibly powerful for all these people to be able to use code to do things for their jobs that they weren't able to before, but it creates this massive new set of 

of 

challenges.

Some of them are just knowing what to use that for and how to do that and how to even think in those terms. But a second part is obviously all the sort of security and guardrails issues that, that come up. And increasingly, that's not just because people are doing it wrong, but because the agents are powerful and tenacious enough that they tend to escape containment pretty quickly and, and kind of weave their way into lots of different systems.

So I, actually 

see that as an area where the role of champions is going to become even more mission-critical because it's not just, " Hey, we're under-optimizing this opportunity." It's, you know, 

the, roles are changing 

fundamentally and creating all these new challenges, and we simply have to 

[00:37:00] out how 

to 

all those challenges so we 

we can kind of move forward.

So 

think that this 

this type of mindset and this type of role is gonna become just nothing but more important for companies going forward.

I agree. And instead of shutting them down because you're concerned that less professional builders are building, do the enablement and the infrastructure and, and even train more 

of the 

subject matter experts 'cause they will work on the right use cases. And I believe that this is 

more 

challenging than mastering the technology itself

So going 

back to the, the, training and obviously this is gonna be a part of the boot camp, but what do you see broadly speaking as how much is that about the skills of AI and making sure that they're as up-to-date as possible and current with the state-of-the-art 

versus some 

specific discipline around how they transmit it internally?

I mean, obviously I 

I think it's both, but, you know, 

you view 

view that,

breakdown?

So 

obviously you need both, but I actually think that the building part is the easy part in the sense that's not necessarily [00:38:00] unique knowledge. like there are 

ways, including 

just trial and error where, people learn how to build 

of the things. 

Where it matters 

is, for example, the, the topic that I've shown.

So evaluation of what you- you're building is not something that someone 

accidentally lands 

upon. That's something that differentiates the champion 

the regular 

user. So we will pay a lot of emphasis on the things that are not just teachable by watching I don't know, a YouTube video or playing with the tool and just figuring it out for yourself because the tool itself is very powerful in letting 

know what to 

to do 

or even doing the 

the work for you.

But the... 

let's call it the in-between business technology and people side of everything that I just 

out 

q- like I mentioned before, these are the things that we will make sure that people come out 

with, 

with proper playbooks because many of them are still being written as we speak.

And it's not 

something that most companies will know how to train 

own people 

All 

right. Well, Nufar, this is awesome stuff. Um, last thing to mention, I guess,

for folks 

who watch this and who wanna start bringing some of these ideas back to their organization, 

[00:39:00] I will be 

be posting this presentation on the companion website for this episode, which is at aidailybrief.ai.

so 

so you can go back and see all of these sort of the breakdowns 

this sort of stuff. 

But Nufar, a-always great to have you on the show. I think this is a particularly important topic, and excited to see how and learn more about how people are 

this issue.

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