The AI champions strategy of 2023 doesn't work in 2026. Let me give you my very hot take 🔥 (And know that this is anecdotal, and the world …

The AI champions strategy of 2023 doesn't work in 2026. Let me give you my very hot take 🔥 (And know that this is anecdotal, and the world of AI changes every 2 heartbeats, so by the time I finish this sentence, we might see another strategy win out). In 2023, the best advice was to find AI champions across your org and incentivize/elevate them. "Look at Joel! Look at the crazy way he summarized all of our product reviews into one paragraph! Be like Joel!" "Look at Lynda! Lynda just figured out a way to upload our invoices and audit each one with a GPT! Be like Lynda!" You could easily find them because they were some of the only people internal to your company actually using AI with any regularity. Engineer/product were the top adopters, followed by marketing and sales. Finance and legal and HR were behind on adoption (that part isn't anecdotal - McKinsey and IBM research back it up). In 2026, it's still important to find your weirdos, to grab the outliers and propagate the big AI learnings, but they're harder to find. Why? (1) Because you can't just pull usage numbers and say "these are our superusers" - there are plenty of heavy users leveraging AI for high volume, lightweight productivity (ex: writing emails) (2) Because the weirdos are actually less likely to raise their hands - they've learned that having to teach tens of thousands of people slows down their own experimentation, and they want to keep the 10-100x work transformation to themselves to stay ahead and protect their careers. In fact, if you did an AI champions call at your company, my guess is the people who immediately raise their hands are not your superusers. Instead, they're the ones operating in the early 2025 paradigm with a few automated workflows - which again, are useful but do not represent the transformation we're seeing in individuals' days. My current advice is to build a frontier unit (or "lab" or "strike team") with two categories of builder: → Builder - doer: these are the experimenters building memory loops and AI workforces and heartbeats and goal flywheels. They understand the importance of context layers and multi-agent orchestration. They're not necessarily - and shouldn't only be - engineers. Protect their plates so they keep pushing at the edge. → Builder - expander: these are AI translators who shadow your doers and learn from them, and then teach the mindset shift and best methods to everyone else. They're trusted in the org and quickly figure out signal from noise. They tend to be more business-oriented (which doesn't mean they're not technical). They, like the doers, are also cross-dept. Think internal FDE. Quit treating them as one group. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Source: Allie K. Miller (X) | 2026-06-08