To prevent leaders from delegating AI to a "chief AI officer," Nikesh Arora runs a bi-weekly "AI AIO" meeting. Leaders must share their progress, creating a Darwinian competition that leverages their ambition and learning mindset to accelerate transformation from the top down.

To drive portfolio-wide AI adoption, THL facilitates cross-pollination of ideas between companies in different verticals (e.g., healthcare and tech). It also frames initiatives as gamified 'challenges' rather than top-down directives to foster innovation, secure buy-in, and better navigate change management.

To drive internal change like adopting coding agents, Snowflake's CEO combines top-down goals with bottoms-up enthusiasm. He finds and elevates passionate early adopters—like a founder who fell in love with coding agents—whose influence proves more effective at driving change than executive mandates alone.

Instead of a top-down AI strategy, Brookfield encourages its 500 portfolio companies to experiment independently. The key is a structured process for sharing all outcomes. A successful application in one business can be rapidly deployed elsewhere, while failures prevent 499 other companies from making the same mistake.

The CEO of NASDAQ-listed Progeny championed AI adoption by using the tools himself daily. He shared weekly updates on what worked and what failed, encouraging grassroots experimentation far more effectively than a simple top-down mandate and license rollout could.

To encourage AI adoption beyond top-down mandates, a hedge fund uses social learning techniques. These include weekly emails with leaderboards showing who uses AI tools most and informal meetups to discuss prompts and use cases, making discovery more social and accessible.

To get teams to embrace AI, leaders should ditch generic mandates like "use more AI." Instead, focus on specific business transformations and highlight the customer value they create. Using company-wide forums for "show and tell" sessions where teams demonstrate unarguable successes makes adoption organic and outcome-driven, not a top-down chore.

To drive AI transformation at Dell, Michael Dell used a powerful thought experiment. He challenged his team to imagine a new competitor, built from the ground up with AI, that would put them out of business in five years. Their new mission: become that faster, more innovative company before someone else does.

AI's rapid evolution breaks traditional change management. Instead of top-down projects, identify employees naturally excited by this dynamism. Elevate these "culture carriers" to experiment, share successes, and help peers adapt, making transformation a continuous, peer-led process.