Enabling AI at RevGen: Using Our Own AI Workforce Framework

“Ask yourself the question: how is AI purposefully and deliberately enabling your people to work towards your company’s strategic goals?” Pero Dalkovski, RevGen’s Vice President of Data, AI, and Technology, said. “It’s critical to know what you’re striving for versus simply doing more AI.”

More and more often, we’re seeing our clients bump up against limited ROI in their AI implementations. These issues aren’t arising from technical limitations but oftentimes from AI workforce enablement. This is why we build change enablement into every project we do, even internally.

Pero has been leading the charge on RevGen’s AI enablement, starting with establishing strong AI Governance. This has helped ease the path to adoption. “Adoption and governance go hand-in-hand. We want to roll things out as quickly as we can, give our folks AI tools and capabilities, and train them on how to effectively use these tools and capabilities, but we want to have peace of mind we aren’t introducing unacceptable risk. That’s where governance comes in.”

In ensuring that we were tying our enablement efforts back to firm strategy, Pero and the rest of the leadership team came up with goals that directly support our business success and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), such as enabling 100% of employees with tooling and training, and using AI as a key contributor in over 50% of sales pursuits.

The team also brought in some fresh perspective by adding Lisa Walvoord, Chief of Staff and Director of Communications, to help hit those goals—which were all achieved by early June, despite an end of year deadline.

“Our early success in getting employees trained and tooled can be credited first to having leadership support, including insistence on finding training that would be applicable to all employees [not just our engineering staff],” Lisa said, “and increasing flexibility in terms of what tools employees could select for different use cases.”

While she has a long career in change management, putting together a plan for AI has been a new challenge for Lisa. “AI is changing so quickly that we couldn’t spend too much time in design mode. The scope of what’s possible keeps moving—there’s no finish line. We needed to jump in, try some small things, iterate, and expand.”

Still, four key pillars of change enablement have all been accounted for in our internal plan: Communication, Training, Coaching, and Incentives.

Best practices for using AI in sales pursuits and project work have become routine shares in leadership meetings as well as our all-hands Town Halls. The introductory training course was launched in April, with the required completion date in May. Subject matter experts on AI, both from a business and technical perspective, made themselves available to share and coach those interested in learning more. And, crucially, the AI Training and Adoption Committee launched a set of incentivizing ‘badges’ to encourage strategic AI work.

Named for Colorado’s famous 14,000-foot mountains, our first badge, Pike’s Peak, rewards employees who complete at least 6 hours of structured AI training. This directly ties back to upskilling our teams. The Mt. Bierstadt badge requires sharing how AI was used to gain efficiencies in client delivery, encouraging communication and coaching. Our third announced badge, the Mt. Elbert, is tied to sharing sales artifacts, with more stringent requirements for RevGen leadership, who handle much of the business development.

“The ‘adoption challenge’ with badges added a fun recognition factor to start, but more importantly, it aligns directly to our goals and provides mechanisms for learning from one another,” said Lisa.

Another critical component to driving our adoption was implementing one of the most-requested internal use cases: an AI-powered knowledge base we call Revgnos.

“Our goal was to make our firm’s intelligence from the 18+ years of excellent client delivery easily accessible,” Pero explained. “There were a couple of hurdles standing in our way to hitting that objective, namely dark data in the form of many documents spread across our SharePoint sites, [Microsoft] Teams channels, intranet, and corporate systems.”

We also needed to ensure that there was, again, proper governance in place, so that once we introduced AI into our systems, sensitive information remained private. Beyond that, it was all about access.

Pero continued, “We needed to make available information cross-account and cross-lines-of-business, moving from individual intelligence to firm-wide intelligence. Revgnos has no doubt been a game changer in accelerating our progress towards our strategic objectives this year.”

In the end, flexibility in rolling out our AI workforce enablement has been key, and it’s what we would encourage for all our clients. “Moving quickly is absolutely important given the pace of change that AI is introducing within enterprises, and doing so responsibly is equally important,” said Pero.

Lisa agreed. “Encourage and recognize adoption of AI tools, don’t mandate, at least not to start. That should include providing low-pressure opportunities for those most comfortable to share how they’re using AI and create a sense of trust for those most reluctant to learn.”

Curious to learn more about how RevGen structured our own AI enablement and governance? Contact us today to speak to one of our experts.