The AI lightbulb moment

When it comes to rolling out AI effectively, there’s nothing more important than helping your team find their AI lightbulb moment.

Many of us have experienced it. It’s your first “wow moment” when AI does something unexpectedly well. And you know you found it if the next question is: “I wonder what else this can do for me?”

We’ve worked with some pretty big AI skeptics. And this is always the moment they start to turn around.

Navigating your organization’s AI journey starts with acknowledging that every individual is on their own AI journey as well. Which means being an effective champion for AI transformation starts with being a champion of each person’s AI journey.

The three personas

The biggest mistake we see in adopting AI is structuring it as a top-down directive. That might work for a week or so, but it won’t stick.

The key is to invert this. Instead of focusing on the outcomes we need to see immediately, focus on the personas and what AI can do for them. Here are three common personas we work with every day, and their lightbulb moments.

Executive

The executive is paid to make decisions and solve the problems that no one else can solve. Their time is extremely valuable, which means a big part of the job is deciding what is or isn’t worth their time at all.

For many executives we work with, the AI lightbulb moment is an inbox triage agent. It’s the AI version of an executive assistant, and it takes about five minutes to set up.

• Task. Look through everything since the last scan and triage it into three buckets: informational, needs reply, and urgent needs reply. For informational, summarize the key points as an executive brief. For needs reply, draft a response for me to review in my inbox. For urgent needs reply, bubble up each item for me to action.
• Connectors. Email, Slack, Calendar.
• Schedule. Daily, 7am local time.

Manager

The manager is the glue that makes it all work. They hold the most context about day-to-day projects, and when memory fails them they have to go and search for the information by hand. Sometimes that takes minutes, sometimes hours.

For many managers we work with, the AI lightbulb moment is a very fast search and retrieval use case. In the past, only the most sophisticated companies had a searchable knowledge base. With a few connectors this is now possible for everyone.

• Connectors. Email, Slack, Google Drive.
• Prompt. Look through everything and find [insert description]. Here is a hint on where it might be: [insert hint].

The key in these prompts is giving AI hints about how to navigate your company systems, for example explaining the Google Drive directory structure. Just because AI has access to everything doesn’t mean it will be able to find it. This is often the difference between AI finding the right answer in 30 seconds and not finding it at all after 15 minutes of spinning its wheels.

Individual contributor

This one varies a lot more, because individual contributors at different companies do very different things.

• Analyst. Market analysis, deep research.
• Associate. Building slide decks, drafting memos.
• Engineer. Architecture design, writing code.

But if I had to pick one that seems to generalize pretty well, it would be the deep research use case. Because no matter what, at the end of the day ICs are presenting to someone like their manager. And when you present findings or decisions, you always need to back them up with as much research as possible.

Closing

We believe that meaningful and enduring AI adoption is bottom-up. This means that instead of sending out mass surveys, we spend 1:1 time with people to brainstorm, troubleshoot, and find that lightbulb moment.