Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

Most companies run AI adoption from the top down. Buy the licenses, send the memo, schedule the training, then wait for it to take.

It doesn't take. And the reason isn't that the tools aren't good enough.

The real barrier to getting value out of AI right now is that the knowledge of what's actually possible is locked behind people who haven't seen it yet.

Here's how to unlock it. 👇️ 

📒 DEEP DIVE

The AI Evangelist Playbook

How to turn AI from a subscription nobody uses into a capability your whole company runs on.

Exposure (not training) is the bottleneck

Your company is full of people who know things about the business that nobody else does. What it does, how it works, the things they could finally get to if the drudgery disappeared.

The catch is that they have no idea what's possible with these tools. The insight stays locked behind people who have never watched AI do the work.

So the question stops being how you train everyone on AI. It becomes how you show everyone what's possible. Those are different projects, and confusing them is where most adoption efforts die.

Step 1: Pick one obsessed person to lead it

You need one person to start. Call them the manager of AI, or whatever you want. I hate the word evangelist, but everyone knows what that means

The only filter that matters: they have to be genuinely electrified by it.

Not interested. Not willing. Electrified. If sitting down with these tools feels like a drag to them every time, you've got the wrong person. AI is moving fast enough right now that you need someone who will stay in it, because keeping a finger on the pulse while also doing anything else with your life is a challenge.

This person doesn't need to know everything that's possible. They need to know enough to show a few things that work.

Step 2: Demos 2x a week, then pair with your best people

Have your AI lead do this a couple of times a week. Have them do nothing more than show what they've built with AI to solve a real problem the company actually has.

If you're remote, it's a Zoom call. Someone screen-shares the thing they made and walks through it. That's the whole event.

Then pair them with your top producers, the people who already drive the most value for your customers. Let those people watch the work happen live, then start demoing what they've built themselves.

That's how the motion starts moving. One person shows, a few more start showing, and soon it spreads on its own.

Step 3: Put the AI where your team already works

Demos get adoption moving. Exposure keeps it going.

The AI needs to be wherever your company actually lives day-to-day. For most teams, that's Slack. People are in Slack all day, every day, for years on end. (Salesforce figured this out too. If they hadn't made AI accessible right where teams work, somebody would have disrupted them for it.)

Here's why that placement matters more than it looks: When the bots are out in the open, the slower-to-adopt people watch how everyone else is prompting and interacting.

Month 1, they're thinking: I would never have thought to do that.

In month 2, they start doing it that way themselves.

Then they start pushing the limits, asking it to do things nobody on the team had tried. That's a massive discovery cycle, and it's one of the most valuable things that can happen inside a company right now. But it only happens when the tools are visible instead of buried in everyone's private setup.

Skip the training and show people what's possible

None of this is technical instruction. That's the part most leaders get backwards.

If the tools are set up well, normal people need 0 training. Your grandparents can text. If they can text, they can talk to an AI agent. It feels like talking to a human. I've done no training for the people who adopted what I built, and I haven't needed to.

People don't need instructions on how to use AI. They need their eyes opened to what's possible. Once they see it, they go.

BEFORE YOU GO…

You don't need a budget, a vendor, or a 6-month rollout to start this week.

Find the 1 person on your team who lights up when they talk about this stuff. Give them 2 hours a week to show everyone else what they've made.

Then get the tools out of private setups and into the room where your company already works, and watch who starts pushing the limits.

Talk soon,

Chris.