As I’ve been spearheading my consulting firm’s enterprise AI rollout, one core principle I’ve held onto is this that people get excited when they teach others, and people learn best from peers who feel like themselves. Passion compounds when adoption is peer-led.
This became especially clear through the “lunch and learn” initiatives we recently launched. Rather than leadership hosting top-down sessions framed around “we should be doing this in the name of efficiency,” we organized peer-to-peer sessions focused on sharing real use cases. We discuss, demo workflows in real time, compare notes, and discuss what actually works.
Each session has a rotating facilitator who guides the conversation, captures insights, flags recurring themes, and consolidates takeaways. Those insights are then reshared and built upon from session to session, evolving into agents for repeatable use cases and, over time, reshaping entire workflows.
This dynamic closely mirrors the concept of a viral coefficient. In startups, the viral coefficient measures how many new users each existing user brings in. AI adoption works the same way. When one inspires another through lived experience, not mandate, adoption spreads organically.
Inspire first, then automate.
