Despite increased investment in automated tech, many teams still struggle to transform AI adoption in the workplace into meaningful, day-to-day business impact. Approximately 67% of employees report that their organizations have yet to scale AI use successfully.
At ITA Group, we deliberately chose not to chase AI out of pressure or hype. Instead of requiring AI use, we approached AI as a long-term strategic opportunity to engage employees more meaningfully.
We partnered with external experts and attended industry conferences to learn how others approached AI with their teams, and we saw that even advanced organizations were still learning. In many cases, we were ahead of the curve not because of tools, but because of intentionality.
Our process started as a top-down initiative. Executive alignment and a shared belief that understanding AI wasn’t optional created a foundation for how our work and relationship to the new processes and technology would evolve.
We want to share our lessons learned from this process to help other organizations successfully adopt AI with their teams.
Effective AI adoption through employee engagement
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index shows that alignment culture, manager support and talent practices had twice the impact on enterprise AI adoption as individual effort.
We saw firsthand that success didn’t come from the tools themselves, but from our teams’ behaviors. What mattered was how people learned, experimented and built confidence.
Pairing a clear vision with a welcoming space to test, iterate and even fail helped us move beyond theory and into confident, practical application.
Lesson 1: AI adoption requires strategic vision
Focus on a shared foundation that helps team members learn and grow together. Don’t expect immediate AI adoption.
At ITA Group, we kicked off “AI Roadshow” at our annual in-person event to encourage curiosity and build AI literacy and confidence across the organization.
Partnering with our learning and development team, we scheduled live learning sessions and offered on-demand training. We hosted a centralized resource hub for peer learning and provided access to LLM and specialty AI tools. ITA Group also hosted opportunities to experiment with showcases, encouraged cross-functional collaboration and hosted hackathons.
Evolving our AI adoption strategy
Partnering with our HR team each quarter, we used employee sentiment surveys to measure AI readiness. This led us to address questions and concerns about governance and support structures, so team members could keep learning without hesitation.
By encouraging teammates to learn together, experiment and build momentum over time, employees grew more comfortable with the new tech. Teams felt more empowered to rethink workflows and design higher-impact AI solutions and agents.
Related: Employee surveys
Lesson 2: Early AI adoption starts with building confidence
Despite business leaders’ encouragement, many enterprise employees didn’t know where to start with AI adoption. Similarly, our team members were curious but uncertain about security and proprietary data. They didn’t want to get it wrong.
Whether your team uses Google or Microsoft, focus on creating an environment where experimentation feels safe. At ITA Group, we used an employee cohort across product development, team members, and security and governance to host dedicated AI channels in Microsoft Teams. These shared learning spaces encouraged peers to learn from one another. Enthusiastic AI advocates also emerged, fielding questions and sharing knowledge and tips with peers.
We wanted to encourage employees to take risks and try something new, so we celebrated employee wins and recognized improvements and growth at company meetings, through our recognition platform, and on internal video boards. We wanted to nurture team enthusiasm and show how seriously we took AI adoption.
Measuring employee sentiment on AI
Consistently gathering feedback through team surveys helped us build employee confidence, reduce friction and expand adoption in a meaningful way.
Our team tracked AI readiness and sentiment through quarterly surveys, asking questions about how employees felt about adoption and capability. Today, ITA Group scores 72% overall readiness, with nearly 8 in 10 employees expressing confidence in AI's impact on their role and optimism about AI's future within their team.
Related: [Love your people podcast] HR strategies for global team engagement in the age of AI
Lesson 3: AI strengthens leadership development
Leadership played a critical role in our organization's AI adoption. Leaders modeled AI experiments, recognized development and reinforced responsible use. More importantly, leaders helped team members integrate their role with AI solutions.
To promote and uplift team member development, we understood that human expertise remained essential. Our customers and competitors have access to the same AI tools and resources today, from Salesforce Einstein, Claude or Microsoft Edge. What set our team apart were the people behind the prompts. Strategy, judgment, client context and nuanced decision-making continued to sit firmly with our people.
Leadership modeled how AI was a tool to enhance our work, not replace employees. Managers used AI for fresh takes on articulating vision, coaching and staying closely connected as roles and workflows evolved.
Understanding the impact of AI on our business
Through surveys and direct conversations, we asked leaders to identify current and future AI use cases within their departments. Together, we explored what we could implement in the next 30, 60 and 90 days, while continuing to build toward longer-term transformation and growth.
The organization's AI efforts generate increasing business value, with the average impact of active initiatives increasing more than 30% as capabilities matured, adoption increased and successful use cases scaled.
Lesson 4: Governance enables responsible scale
With AI quickly evolving, employees were concerned about how to responsibly use AI at work. Teams looked for clear guardrails, not only to protect data and IP, but to keep employees secure too.
Educating employees on responsible use encouraged progress. More knowledge empowered employees to experiment, take risks and try new things.
Our company-wide kickoff set expectations early, reinforcing that innovation and risk management go hand in hand. We invested in enterprise-grade tools, established clear security oversight and partnered with external experts.
We also kept employees updated as AI tools evolved. Transparency at the individual level helped team members understand what was expected, what was allowed and how to use AI responsibly in their work.
Establishing AI policy and protection
Team members are required to sign our organization’s AI Acceptable Use Policy and sign into the AI tool, ensuring accountability. Monitoring systems protect all stakeholders, from clients to team members.
We focused on enterprise tools that integrated within our ecosystem in a closed AI environment, protecting proprietary data. We evaluated specialty tools from a security and legal compliance lens to ensure both our clients and our organization were protected.
Lesson 5: AI adoption succeeds through learning at scale
Mandating AI adoption at work doesn’t drive meaningful change. At ITA Group, progress came from consistent learning, hands-on experience and continuously evolving our adoption strategy.
We supported growth and discovery through a mix of large-scale trainings and smaller, focused sessions, giving team members multiple ways to engage based on their role and comfort level. AI hackathons invited teams to create AI solutions for real business needs. Our CEO, Brent Vander Waal, said it was one of the most important initiatives we had in the past year.
Focusing on employee engagement with these AI-focused events helped us achieve a “coherent workforce strategy,” according to the Harvard Business Review. One hackathon resulted in creating an AI agent for air-travel booking for ITA Group’s incentive travel clients. Development wasn’t the issue. Rather, we saw that human intervention was needed to fully optimize cost and attendees’ registration experience.
These moments helped us learn one of our most valuable lessons throughout this process: the importance of pairing our expertise with AI.
Employee recognition was central to nurturing progress at scale. High-impact use cases were shared across the organization, from company updates and monthly reporting to senior leadership, reinforcing what success looks like and encouraging others to follow.
Reviewing AI adoption at scale
As we measured progress, we built a clearer understanding of where AI drove value. We tracked the average number of AI prompts in the first month and had leadership score high-impact use cases using a rubric.
Employee adoption went from 67% to 85% in a few months. Employees using AI tools for most of their workweek went from 12% to 48% in five months. Our organization’s average prompt count per week is four times what it was when we first began using AI tools.
A shared foundation of knowledge, trust and governance unified teams across the organization, much like intentional engagement strategies scale across diverse environments. Teams not only meaningfully engaged in the new program but embraced the tools in their roles and teams.
Building an AI strategy that puts people first
Successful AI adoption isn’t about investing in the right software. It’s about how organizations empower people at the heart of this change.
Organizations that scale AI effectively invest in learning resources to build confidence, balance innovation with governance and recognize wins along the way.
These leaders keep people at the center of decision-making.
More importantly, these leaders keep humans at the center of decision-making. By encouraging employee development and normalizing experimentation and risk, institutions build more capable, resilient teams who are ready to evolve alongside AI advancements.
Set the tone for a connected, confident company culture that’s ready to change with new tech. Invest in leadership learning and development with ITA Group’s five-step road map.