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.

The best test of knowledge is the ability to teach it. By having employees explain a new AI tool or workflow to their peers, they are forced to solidify their own understanding and identify knowledge gaps. This process turns passive learning into active expertise.

To make AI adoption tangible, Zapier built rubrics defining "AI fluency" for different roles and seniority levels. By making these skills a measurable part of performance reviews and rewards, you create clear incentives for employees to invest their time in developing them, as behavior follows what gets measured.

Snowflake established a cross-functional AI council with volunteers who dedicate 10-20% of their time to experimentation. This avoids chaotic, duplicated efforts from a company-wide mandate. The council then shares learnings and rolls out proven use cases to the broader team quarterly, ensuring structured adoption.

Driving company-wide AI adoption doesn't require massive training programs. Short, consistent, and practical 15-minute weekly sessions showcasing useful applications can create a powerful cultural shift and accelerate learning more effectively than large-scale, infrequent training.

To ensure AI adoption is a core competency, formally integrate it into your team's operating system. Webflow is redoing its career ladder to make AI fluency a requirement for advancement, expecting team members not just to use tools but to lead, own, and push the boundaries of AI in their work.

Media company Wait What halted all work for three days for an immersive "AI sprint." Every employee formed small teams to build AI-driven solutions for specific business problems. This collective, hands-on approach accelerates adoption and surfaces practical, immediate use cases far more effectively than traditional training.

Snowflake drove internal AI transformation through a dual approach. The CEO issued a top-down mandate making AI non-negotiable, while the company simultaneously provided bottom-up empowerment by giving all employees access to a coding agent to build their own tools and solutions.

To scale internal AI knowledge, Wrike created a formal library of AI-enabled workflows. They also dedicate time in monthly marketing all-hands for team members to showcase what they've built, which fosters peer-to-peer learning and cross-functional inspiration.