故事内容：“找到一个‘AI 领导者’（即负责推动 AI 应用的核心人员），并为其工作安排 20% 的专属时间；等待这一举措逐渐在团队中普及。”与我同场的人中，有人在机器人流程自动化时代就曾尝试过这样的做法。当时他们的领导层同意为这位 AI 领导者提供 20% 的专属工作时间；但一个月后，管理层却取消了这一规定，因为还有更多工作需要处理。
Find a champion. Protect 20% of their time. Wait for it to spread. One of the people in the room with me had run that play before, in the era of robotic process automation. Their leadership agreed to protect 20% of an AI champion’s time. A month later, the manager had taken it back.
这个故事来自 Zapier 公司的运营负责人。Zapier 是一家专注于自动化解决方案的公司，他们于 9 月 8 日至 10 日在温莎附近的 Oakley Court 举办了一场仅限受邀人士参加的研讨会。Zapier 公司负责为所有参与者提供机票、住宿和餐饮费用（包括我在内）。当天的会议由 Zapier 的 AI 转型总监 Philip Lakin 以及负责 AI 领导者培养项目的 Alex Maxwell 主持。
There was more work to do. That story came from an operations leader at Zapier Outpost Windsor, an invite-only retreat the automation company ran at Oakley Court, on the Thames near Windsor, from 8 to 10 September. Zapier covered flights, lodging and meals for the people it invited, me included. The day’s sessions were led by Philip Lakin, Zapier’s director of AI transformation, and Alex Maxwell, who runs Zapier’s AI Leaders Lab.
Lakin 强调：“必须将推动 AI 应用视为公司的核心工作，而不仅仅是一个次要项目；否则，领导层永远不会真正支持这一举措。”他指出：“除非你为员工创造相应的时间，并让他们明白你真正重视这项工作，否则无论你给予什么样的激励或补偿，都无法让这一举措真正落地。”
Make it the job, not a side project Lakin did not argue. In that case, he said, leadership had never really aligned behind it. “Unless you create the time and you show that you actually value it, what you compensate, what you incentivize, and what you create time for, it’s never gonna happen,” Lakin said. Zapier’s own structure reflects this.
Zapier 公司的内部架构也体现了这一理念：负责 AI 转型的团队成员虽然仍从事本职工作，但他们 30% 到 40% 的工作时间用于推动公司的数字化转型。Zapier 会为他们免除其他工作任务，使他们能够专注于这项工作。该团队的职责主要包括三个方面：倾听用户需求、开发新的 AI 应用，以及将这些计划转化为可衡量的实际成果。
People on its AI transformation guild sit in their lines of business. But 30% to 40% of their job is transformation work, and Zapier removes that share of their other duties. The role has three parts: listening to users, building, and turning the mandate into things the team can measure. Spreading it thin fails too. Telling a whole company that AI is 10% of everyone’s job gives nobody a reason to make time.
如果将 AI 应用的推广工作分散到整个团队中，反而会适得其反——因为告诉所有员工“AI 是每个人工作的一部分”并不会激励他们主动投入时间。Lakin 说：“当每个人都觉得自己对 AI 负责时，实际上就没有人真正负责这项工作了。”
“When everyone’s responsible for something, no one’s responsible for it,” Lakin said. Start with relief, not efficiency The usual pitch for AI is efficiency: save time, cut cost. The people doing the work read it differently. They either have no time to experiment, or they suspect that mapping their own workflows is the first step to replacing them.
关于 AI 的常见宣传观点：通常，人们会强调 AI 的效率优势（如节省时间、降低成本），但实际从事这项工作的人对此有不同的看法：他们要么没有时间进行实验，要么担心自己工作流程的优化反而会导致自己被取代。
The pitch that works, Lakin told the room, is relief: something that removes the part of the job people hate, or that “makes you look good”. At the end of the day, one attendee said the question they would take home was exactly that.
“有效的解决方案，”拉金对在场的所有人说，“应该是那些能够缓解员工工作压力的方法——也就是那些能够消除员工对工作厌恶情绪的措施，或者那些能让员工在工作中‘表现更好’的方法。”最后，有一位与会者表示，他们带回家思考的问题正是这个。我们应该问员工他们讨厌工作的哪些方面，而不是如何节省工作时间。
Ask what people hate about their job, not how they could save time. TNW has reported on both halves of that fear. Meta’s chief technology officer has said AI productivity gains mean more work, not time off. Hyundai workers voted to strike over automation. Younger workers report feeling guilty about using AI at work at all.
《TNW》杂志曾报道过这种恐惧心理的两种表现形式：一方面，Meta公司的首席技术官指出，人工智能虽然提高了工作效率，但同时也意味着员工需要完成更多的工作；另一方面，现代汽车的工人曾因自动化问题而投票决定罢工；还有些年轻员工表示，他们在工作中使用人工智能时会感到内疚。
Find the champions by watching, not asking Someone asked how to identify the people worth investing in, when most of the organisation already has more work than it can carry. Grady Sokaras, Zapier’s head of sales, gave two routes.
要找到那些值得投资的人才，最好的方法不是直接询问，而是通过观察他们的表现来发现他们。当整个组织的工作量已经超出承受能力时，我们更应该关注那些能够主动解决问题的人。
You hire the person outright, or you bring a group through a basic workshop and watch. Zapier runs a 90-minute session that teaches a small group to build its first workflow.
Zapier公司的销售主管格雷迪·索卡拉斯提出了两种方法：要么直接雇佣这些人，要么组织他们参加一个基础培训课程，通过观察他们的表现来评估他们的潜力。Zapier公司会举办一个90分钟的培训课程，教这些员工如何构建自己的第一个工作流程；之后再对这些员工进行进一步培训，让他们将使用人工智能的工作量增加到他们总工作量的30%到40%，甚至全部工作量。
You see who it clicks for. Then you train those people and make the work 30% to 40% of their job, or all of it. The company has published its own account of the same approach, including hackathons and internal champions. The theory behind it is that people who know how to build spot better problems, even when they never build the production version themselves.
该公司自己也分享了自己采用类似方法的经验，包括通过举办编程马拉松（hackathons）以及培养内部“技术先锋”（internal champions）来推动技术应用。其背后的理念是：即使这些人从未亲自开发出最终的产品版本，但他们至少懂得如何识别真正值得解决的问题。
Market the results or lose the time“Things do not, especially in operations, things do not internally market themselves,” Lakin said. “They have to be marketed.”That is how a champion keeps the time. Lakin told the room to go back to the managers who control their workload with the figures.
“任何改进措施，尤其是在运营领域，都无法自行‘推广’给相关人员；它们必须通过营销手段才能被大家知晓，”拉金说。“只有这样，那些能够推动技术应用的人才能真正节省工作时间。”拉金建议大家向那些负责分配工作量的经理们提供相关数据：“你的经理知道你通过这些努力将工作量减少了多少吗？他们为什么要削减你的工作时间呢？”
“Does your manager know that you took this number and made it this number? Why would they ever take time away from you?”Lakin said. Diagnose which layer is broken Lakin walked the room through a three-layer diagnostic. Start at the bottom: if people in the lines of business are not pushing ideas up to the AI guild, the problem is enablement and skills. Then the middle.
为了诊断问题所在，拉金向大家介绍了一种三层诊断方法：首先从最基层开始检查——如果业务部门的员工没有将自己的想法上报给负责人工智能应用的团队，那么问题就出在员工的能力和技能培养上。
If they push plenty, but nothing gets access to data or moves across departments, the problem is the cross-functional layer. Ticket triage exists in every line of business, and somebody has to turn that into one pattern instead of ten.
接着看中间层。如果他们大力推动，相关人员仍无法获取数据，工作也无法跨部门流转，那么问题就出在跨职能层。每条业务线都有工单分诊机制，必须有人将其统一为一种模式，而不是十种。
Then look up. If both of those work and nothing changes, either the mandate was too vague, or the level below the chief executive is not translating it into anything measurable. VPs, directors and senior managers control the reward structures, and the mandate rarely reaches their own numbers.
然后再看上层。如果上述两方面都做得很好，却仍然没有变化，那么要么是任务要求过于笼统，要么是首席执行官以下的人没有将其转化为任何可衡量的目标。副总裁、总监和高级经理掌控着奖励机制，而这项要求通常也无法转化为他们自身的业绩指标。“一百万年之遥”一名参会者表示，其公司距离创建一种介于运营与IT之间的职位还“差着一百万年”。Zapier的凯文·福雷斯特尔对此提出异议。他说，鉴于 things 推进得
‘A million years away’One attendee said their company was “a million years away” from creating the kind of role that sits between operations and IT. Kevin Forestell of Zapier pushed back. Given how quickly things are moving, he said, consider halving the time you think you need, or at least hold it lightly. The person who raised it had already made the point. Nine months ago, they said, their own role did not exist. Surface-level adoption keeps widening the divide, and investors are funding the training meant to close it. The AI skills firm Multiverse raised $70m in May. Someone has to be given the time, measured on what they do with it, and believed when they show the results.