- Adoption After We Leave
Building an AI Champion Program
Training creates a moment. Champions create a habit. One or two people with a little authority and a little time are what turn a rollout into the way things are done, and the five prompting habits are what they end up teaching most often.
WHY IT WORKS
People Ask the Colleague Two Desks Away
When someone is unsure whether they can use a tool for a task, they do not open the policy and they do not email IT. They ask whoever is nearby and seems to know. That conversation is where adoption actually happens, and a champion program is simply the decision to make sure the person being asked has the right answer.
It is also the cheapest thing on this list. One or two people, an hour a week, and a direct line to us when they hit something they cannot answer.
Champion programs work differently in a fifteen-person Dallas practice than in a company with a training department. There is no internal learning and development function to hand this to, so the champion is someone with a full-time job already, and the program has to fit around it.
GETTING IT RIGHT
Five Things That Decide Whether It Sticks
Pick the trusted one, not the technical one
The right champion is whoever colleagues already ask when something is confusing. Enthusiasm for technology is far less useful than being someone people are willing to admit ignorance in front of.
Give them real time
An hour a week, protected and acknowledged. A champion role added on top of a full workload becomes a title nobody has capacity to act on.
Give them a route to a real answer
A named contact for questions they cannot resolve. For our managed clients that is us. The important part is that “I’ll find out” is a promise they can keep.
Let them say no
A champion who only ever encourages is a salesperson and gets treated as one. The ability to say “that is not a good use of this tool” is what earns the credibility the role needs.
Have them collect what they hear
Recurring questions, tasks people wish were automated, and things that quietly failed. This is the best product feedback in the business and it usually reaches nobody.
Name them publicly
People cannot ask a champion they do not know exists. Announce it once and put the name in the policy, section six of the one- pager is exactly this.
The failure mode to watch for
A champion who becomes the person who does all the AI work rather than the person who helps others do it. It looks like success for a quarter, output goes up, questions go down, and then that person leaves and the capability leaves with them. If your champion is doing rather than teaching, the program has quietly inverted.
Should the champion be paid more?
That is your call, but it should be recognized somehow, in a review, in title, or in protected time. An unacknowledged extra responsibility is one people quietly stop doing, usually right about when it was starting to work.
What if our champion leaves?
Have two from the start if you can, and keep what they learn in a shared place rather than in their head. This is the same key-person dependency question that applies everywhere else in a small business.
Can you just be our champion?
We can be the escalation point, and for many clients we are. What we cannot be is the person two desks away at four on a Thursday, and that person is the one who determines whether the tool gets used. The role has to be internal to work.
BK
Written and reviewed by Bob Kehr, President & Founder of Kehr Technologies, Plano City Council member, and Plano Chamber Small Business Person of the Year 2022, the champions in his clients’ businesses are usually the person he speaks to most, and rarely the most technical one.
Last reviewed August 2026 · Questions we have not answered here? Call 214-444-3583. Kehr Technologies is based in Plano, Texas, and works with businesses throughout the Dallas area.