3× as likely to have established real ROI from AI when a named executive is accountable for the outcome (14% vs. 4%) KPMG International, Global AI Pulse Survey · Q2 2026 · n=2,145

Ownership is not a nicety attached to access. It is most of the difference.

How It Started

That assumption missed where the actual appetite was. On my team at Epsilon, some of the people asking hardest for access were not engineers at all. They were the ones already frustrated by a piece of manual work and certain a tool could help. I started packaging their requests into business cases leadership could act on, and I built in one condition before asking for approval: whoever got access had to commit to building something and sharing it, not just holding a license. Ownership came first. Usage proved it.

A handful of people got access that way, and we learned a valuable insight alongside their work. The same curiosity that made them ask for a tool early made them easy to coach into internal champions once colleagues started asking how they did it. The few who were building started showing others what they had made, and that visibility spread interest faster than any top-down announcement could have. People who had not asked for access started asking, because they had watched someone at the next desk get real time back. A bottom-up culture was forming, one demonstration at a time, well before anyone put a name to it.

What Made It Spread

Access eventually widened well past that first group, partly to give everyone a sanctioned way in rather than leaving people to route around the rules on their own. When it did, the organization was not starting from nothing. The senior people and domain experts who had been given access early, on purpose, ahead of the wider rollout, had already grown into champions. They coached the cohorts that formed once access opened up. The same excitement that had built quietly in that first small group carried into teams who had never touched the tools before. The workflow redesigns those early builders had already proven became the foundation the production work was built on.

The lesson I keep coming back to is that the internal champions an organization needs later are usually already sitting inside it, in the two or three people who ask for access more than once, or who are quietly working around a tool that has not given them what they need. Coach those people early, ask for something real in exchange for the access they wanted, and their excitement becomes the bottom-up culture that carries everyone else once a broader mandate arrives.

So who on your team is already doing this? What would it take to hand them a real problem and a reason to show their work?

Prepared by Forjic Technology. This is the Talent & Ownership dimension of the Forjic AI Readiness Survey. For the full analysis behind all five dimensions, see Access Is Not Adoption. Source: KPMG International, Global AI Pulse Survey, Q2 2026, n=2,145.