Master It Before You Mandate It
Master It Before You Mandate It
Master It Before You Mandate It
Role / Title
Director, Brand & Creative
Company
Articulate
Industry
EdTech
Year
2026
Project
Team AI Enablement
Role / Title
Director, Brand & Creative
Company
Articulate
Industry
EdTech
Year
2026
Project
Team AI Enablement
Role / Title
Director, Brand & Creative
Company
Articulate
Industry
EdTech
Year
2026
Project
Team AI Enablement
The team wasn't short on skill, they just didn't believe that AI wouldn't replace them.
Articulate is an e-learning software company serving 150 million learners. It's moving through a new chapter all at once, repositioning and rebranding for the AI era, overhauling the product itself, and expanding from a US-based category leader into a global brand reaching audiences it's never spoken to before.
Nobody on the internal creative team was using AI, and it wasn't a skills problem. Underneath that was real fear and bias around what their job meant if a tool could “replace” the craft and creativity parts of their day to day. No mandate was going to talk anyone out of that.
01.
Context
When I joined, AI capability on the team was effectively nonexistent. This was captured from instinct and validated through a survey that I designed and deployed across the team. The main insight from the survey was that the brand creative team was moving too fast to experiment, so everyone defaulted to the tools and patterns they already knew. Designers, copywriters, managers and operation specialists were executing instead of exploring.
02.
Problem
How do you inspire and enable a team that is resistant to change? A top-down directive (“use these platforms, track your usage”) from their team leader wasn't going to fix the trust that needed to be built in order to explore more AI tools without a sense of fear. However, that is what our executive leadership team expected from team leads.
03.
How I Moved the Org
If I led with a mandate, then compliance would have looked like adoption on a dashboard and produced none of the actual behavior change underneath it. Changing my teammates’ minds meant watching someone they respected actually using the tools, in front of them, before any usage dashboard could tell the story secondhand. I strongly believe that the best leaders “show don’t tell”, so I decided to explore the tools myself as a first step. I secured company funding for paid AI courses and resources, and absorbed as much as I could on my own. Part of the team’s weekly rhythm became a demonstration of how I was using AI in my own real work and that matriculated into a feeling of safety where others would show how they would use it as well. Soon afterwards, the team was engaging in direct questions about where they saw opportunity to use AI in their projects and was approached with a sense of enthusiasm instead of reluctance or fear. Getting a skeptical team to trust new, very different ways of working meant showing them their leader was still learning too (rather than managing from above with a finished mandate). I also took initiative to build custom Claude skills targeting the team's actual friction points: a trade-off negotiator for mid-flight scope creep from marketing, an accessibility-anchored feedback tool, and pitch deck automation.
01.
Context
When I joined, AI capability on the team was effectively nonexistent. This was captured from instinct and validated through a survey that I designed and deployed across the team. The main insight from the survey was that the brand creative team was moving too fast to experiment, so everyone defaulted to the tools and patterns they already knew. Designers, copywriters, managers and operation specialists were executing instead of exploring.
02.
Problem
How do you inspire and enable a team that is resistant to change? A top-down directive (“use these platforms, track your usage”) from their team leader wasn't going to fix the trust that needed to be built in order to explore more AI tools without a sense of fear. However, that is what our executive leadership team expected from team leads.
03.
How I Moved the Org
If I led with a mandate, then compliance would have looked like adoption on a dashboard and produced none of the actual behavior change underneath it. Changing my teammates’ minds meant watching someone they respected actually using the tools, in front of them, before any usage dashboard could tell the story secondhand. I strongly believe that the best leaders “show don’t tell”, so I decided to explore the tools myself as a first step. I secured company funding for paid AI courses and resources, and absorbed as much as I could on my own. Part of the team’s weekly rhythm became a demonstration of how I was using AI in my own real work and that matriculated into a feeling of safety where others would show how they would use it as well. Soon afterwards, the team was engaging in direct questions about where they saw opportunity to use AI in their projects and was approached with a sense of enthusiasm instead of reluctance or fear. Getting a skeptical team to trust new, very different ways of working meant showing them their leader was still learning too (rather than managing from above with a finished mandate). I also took initiative to build custom Claude skills targeting the team's actual friction points: a trade-off negotiator for mid-flight scope creep from marketing, an accessibility-anchored feedback tool, and pitch deck automation.
01.
Context
When I joined, AI capability on the team was effectively nonexistent. This was captured from instinct and validated through a survey that I designed and deployed across the team. The main insight from the survey was that the brand creative team was moving too fast to experiment, so everyone defaulted to the tools and patterns they already knew. Designers, copywriters, managers and operation specialists were executing instead of exploring.
02.
Problem
How do you inspire and enable a team that is resistant to change? A top-down directive (“use these platforms, track your usage”) from their team leader wasn't going to fix the trust that needed to be built in order to explore more AI tools without a sense of fear. However, that is what our executive leadership team expected from team leads.
03.
How I Moved the Org
If I led with a mandate, then compliance would have looked like adoption on a dashboard and produced none of the actual behavior change underneath it. Changing my teammates’ minds meant watching someone they respected actually using the tools, in front of them, before any usage dashboard could tell the story secondhand. I strongly believe that the best leaders “show don’t tell”, so I decided to explore the tools myself as a first step. I secured company funding for paid AI courses and resources, and absorbed as much as I could on my own. Part of the team’s weekly rhythm became a demonstration of how I was using AI in my own real work and that matriculated into a feeling of safety where others would show how they would use it as well. Soon afterwards, the team was engaging in direct questions about where they saw opportunity to use AI in their projects and was approached with a sense of enthusiasm instead of reluctance or fear. Getting a skeptical team to trust new, very different ways of working meant showing them their leader was still learning too (rather than managing from above with a finished mandate). I also took initiative to build custom Claude skills targeting the team's actual friction points: a trade-off negotiator for mid-flight scope creep from marketing, an accessibility-anchored feedback tool, and pitch deck automation.
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