Many innovation teams got a new job this year without applying for it: leading the company’s AI adoption.
Getting a large organization to adopt something new is what we already do. And it’s exactly what most AI plans are missing on the way from ambition to impact.
At Sun Life, Dana’s team cut a big claims plan down to one task and gave it to directors who could decide on the spot. After three weeks together in Seattle, they had a working agent.
At Philips, the business units decide whether to adopt the AI tools Rob’s central team builds. So the team shows each unit, in euros, what those tools would save it.
At Lufthansa, Christoph’s Innovation Hub starts with the leaders, because teams copy how their leader uses AI.
And at CIBC, Camilo’s team reports it’s “no’s” next to its demos and patents.
None of this is new to innovation teams. That’s the point. The AI adoption playbook looks a lot like the innovation playbook, as we’ll see.
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
What It Takes to Get an AI Agent Into the Core Business
Sun Life’s global innovation team didn’t try to bring AI to all of claims at once. It picked one task, gave it to leaders with the authority to decide on the spot, and tested every choice against client impact, technical feasibility, and business value.
Sun Life flew its US claims team from Massachusetts and its technology team from Ireland to Seattle, a city where none of them had an office, and kept them there for three straight weeks. Their job: build an agent that checks claim eligibility across the company’s US products, work that separate teams had been doing by hand, one product at a time.
Dana Parsons, who leads innovation for Sun Life’s global business, set it up this way because of what usually happens to big AI plans. A plan to bring AI into a whole function goes to executives around a table, then to another table in another city, then another, and nothing moves. Her team’s answer is to cut the plan down to one task, give it to a small crew with the authority and time to finish it, and test every decision on three threads: client impact, technical feasibility, and business value.
How to Get Business Units To Adopt AI (Without Forcing Them)
At Philips, AI can cut a seven-months decision on a new value proposition to about a day. To get business units to adopt the tools, the central team first connected the data and showed each unit its savings in euros.
Philips invests €1.7 billion a year in R&D and €1 billion in AI. In its last reorganization, the company moved most decision power from the center to its business units. Since then, each unit manages its own R&D budget and picks its own tools.
Rob de Graaf, Director of Innovation Consulting at Philips, works in the central innovation and design organization that supports those units. His team builds AI and digital tools that speed up R&D work, from managing requirements to shaping new value propositions. The units decide whether to use those tools. So Rob’s team has to show each unit, one by one, that AI is worth its money and its engineers’ time.
What Does Your Team Learn About AI by Watching You?
Lufthansa Group leaders kept running into the same three AI problems: work that colleagues had to redo, teams that stopped asking why, and pilots running in parallel across units. The Lufthansa Innovation Hub trains leaders to fix all three, starting with their own beliefs about AI.
Christoph Volbers trains Lufthansa leaders on AI at the Lufthansa Innovation Hub, a unit at the edge of Lufthansa Group that brings new skills into the company. His sessions often open with a question: what are the different kinds of AI, from simple rule-based systems to today’s agentic AI, and how do they differ? Very few leaders have a quick answer to this.
For the hub however, this gap matters, because teams follow their leaders. Christoph points to research from BCG showing that a team's progress with AI closely matches its leader's view of AI. Across the group, gaps in that view lead to three problems. Leaders let workslop through: AI-assisted work that looks finished until a colleague has to redo it. Teams stop asking why the AI produced an answer, and the work turns into a black box. Units run their own pilots and learn the same lessons alone.
Saying No Is More Than OK: How CIBC’s Innovation Team Makes Its Refusals Count
At CIBC, Camilo Gonzalez Barrero’s enterprise innovation team treats saying no as core work. The team records its refusals and reports them alongside its demos and patents.
Innovation teams keep talking about the same struggle: senior leaders who want AI in everything, as if AI fixes everything on its own. In that setting, saying no can feel like a career risk. Camilo Gonzalez Barrero, who tracks around 20 emerging technologies for CIBC’s enterprise innovation team, makes the case that saying no is more than OK.
Every year, Camilo’s team builds a deck of everything it delivered: demos, proofs of concept, awards and patents. This year, something changed: the deck will also include the team’s refusals. Before, the reasoning behind each refusal stayed out of the deck, so the deck hid how much those refusals mattered and how much value they held.
What’s your innovation team’s role in your company’s AI adoption?
What’s happening @ Novum
Some problems are easier to solve with peers who’ve faced them. Our masterminds (for members of the Novum Suite only) brings senior innovation leaders together in three groups: Building Alignment Across Silos, Managing Governance & Decision Making, and Building Capability & Culture. Calls are happening in the last week of October..
How can public research organizations turn knowledge and technologies into real-world impact? On Tuesday November 3rd Abel Perez-Crespillo, Senior Innovation Lead at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, will present the UKAEA Innovation Management Framework and share how UKAEA is developing a more systematic approach to organizing, governing, and delivering innovation.
Keen to jump on the hotseat and ask your question to peers? Or join discussions about innovation programs and goverance? Join Novum - check this page for more info.
If your team got handed AI adoption, hit reply and tell me how it’s going.
Next week: a (un-)corporate venture builder that isn’t there to grow the P&L. Axel Deniz explains what Bosch Business Innovations is for instead… keeping Bosch competitive in the future.
Hans
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
