Hi Reader,

Last week we released an episode of Built by People Leaders with Greta Stahl, who runs organizational learning and development at Workday.

She told me that most companies buy AI tools and then wait for the magic. And the magic doesn't come. And the reason is that "if you're just bolting on tools to old processes, it's not going to help you grow your business."

There's research showing only about 27% of organizations have actually embedded AI into their core workflows. Everyone else has a pile of licenses and a lot of hope.

The gap isn't the technology. It's the humans.

That’s the part I want to talk about today. Greta and her team ran what they call the Everyday AI Program. It became the largest L&D program in Workday’s twenty-year history. As a result, the monthly adoption of their core AI tools rose above 85%, a jump of more than 40 points from where they started. Conservatively, they estimate they’ve saved more than 600,000 hours.

But there’s a more important number in this story. Their highest AI adopters are spending two-plus additional hours every week collaborating — meeting with stakeholders, meeting with customers. Their time didn’t vanish into more busywork. It got reinvested in the work only people can do.

When I asked Greta how they pulled it off, she shared a structure: mindset, skillset, habits. The goal is to enable every single person to build all three.

Here’s how to do that:

Mindset — get people believing it’s for them. Run events that activate curiosity, where teams compete to solve real problems with AI. That’s how you bring a social element into learning.

See the episode with Monica Duque, Head of People at Influur, to learn more about social learning in AI adoption

It makes AI feel less like a threat and more like something you try alongside your colleagues.

Skillset — show what good looks like. Build a single place to learn. Document specific “AI plays” — concrete moments where someone can drop AI into their actual work. Because it’s one thing to know what AI is. It’s another to know how to use it on the task in front of you.

Habits — make it stick. Have every person set a personal AI goal. Give everyone a simple dashboard showing which tools they’re using and how often. That’s how the behavior — and the change — becomes visible to them. And that’s how new habits form.

And I know what a lean team is thinking right now: that’s Workday, with resources I don’t have. Fair. But really, you don’t need a digital academy — you need one clear place to learn. You don’t need enterprise dashboards — you need to ask people to set one AI goal, and then check in on it.

So if you’re wondering where to start, look at the mindset, the skillset, and the habits — which one is lacking? Have you shifted the mindset? Have you shown them what good looks like on their real work? Have you built anything that turns a one-time try into a habit?

Today’s full conversation with Greta is out now on Built by People Leaders. She goes deep on how they measured all of this, why she thinks judgment is now a core skill, and the hard conversations she believes you can never hand to a bot. It’s worth your time.