Your champions are already in the building.
Ask around your organization and you will find two or three people who already use AI every day. Nobody trained them. They got curious, tried it on a report or a pile of intake forms, and kept going. Most leaders hear about them by accident, usually when a colleague mentions that "Dana does something clever with the scheduling."
These people are the start of your AI program, whether or not you have one yet. The work for leadership is smaller than it sounds: find them, give them time and some recognition, and keep the rest of the team from quietly turning them into a free help desk.
Find them by asking about their work.
Champions rarely sit where you expect. In a town office it might be the clerk who handles permit questions. In a clinic it could be the person at the front desk who rewrote the patient reminder messages, and at a manufacturer, the shift lead who summarizes maintenance logs before the morning meeting. Seniority and job title tell you very little. What you are looking for is a person who has changed how a piece of their own work gets done and can explain the change in a sentence.
The quickest way to find them is to ask a plain question in a staff meeting or a short form: what is one task you now do differently because of an AI tool? Most answers will be thin or empty, which is fine. The two or three detailed ones are your list. Watch also for the person colleagues already go to with "how did you do that?" questions, because the informal help network usually got there before you did.
Give them time, in writing.
The usual mistake is to praise a champion and then change nothing about their week. They keep their full workload and add a stream of questions on top. Within a few months they either stop helping or stop enjoying the work that made them good at it.
Protected time fixes most of this. Say a team of twelve has one champion; two hours a week, named on the calendar and agreed with their manager, is enough to start. Put it in writing, even if it is an email, so nobody has to defend it when a deadline lands. The time is for trying things on real work and showing one or two colleagues what worked, which is plenty for the first few months.
Praise without time just adds unpaid work to the people you most want to keep.
Recognition matters too, and it costs little. Name what they did in front of the people whose opinion they care about, and name the specific task. "Dana cut the Monday scheduling scramble to twenty minutes" means more than a general thank-you, and it tells everyone else what good use looks like.
Keep them from becoming the help desk.
Once word gets around, champions get the same handful of questions over and over: how do I log in, why did it make that up, can it read this PDF. Answering each one by hand feels helpful and wears people down fast. The fix is to make answers reusable. When a champion explains something twice, it goes into a shared page or a short screen recording, and the third person gets a link.
Set limits on what champions own. They help colleagues get started and share what works. They do not approve tools, write policy, handle data questions or fix broken accounts. Those belong to whoever owns AI in your organization, and champions need to be able to say "that one goes to Sam" without feeling they have let someone down. If there is nobody to send those questions to, the champion will end up answering them anyway, and that is usually how burnout starts.
Ask them what they are seeing.
Champions see problems early. They know which tasks the tools handle well, where the output needs checking every time and which data people are pasting into places they shouldn't. That is useful to leadership, and it usually goes nowhere because no one asks.
A short monthly conversation with each champion is enough. Ask what worked, what failed and what they are worried about. Some of what you hear will belong in your policy, and some will point to the next workflow worth fixing. When champions see what they report turn into a decision, they tend to keep telling you things.
A champion program you can run without HR.
None of this needs a new role, a budget line or a formal title. It needs one owner (often the leader who reads this) and about an hour a month of their time. Here is the lightweight version.
The program, in seven steps
- Ask the whole team one question: what task do you now do differently because of AI? Keep the answers.
- Pick two or three champions from the detailed answers. Ask them; don't assign them.
- Agree protected time with each champion's manager, in writing. Start with two hours a week.
- Set the boundaries: champions help people start and share what works. Tools, policy, data and accounts go to a named owner.
- Start one shared page where every answer a champion gives twice gets written down.
- Meet each champion for twenty minutes once a month. Ask what worked, what failed and what worries them, and write down one decision that comes out of it.
- Every quarter, recognize one specific piece of their work in front of the team, and ask whether they still want the role. Let people step down without a fuss, and invite someone else from your list of detailed answers to take their place.
