Cultivating AI Champions
RockyntheBlock — Cultivating AI Champions
Unlocking Continuous Transformation
People don’t follow companies — they follow people. That’s why so many AI transformations flop.
Whitehead said it best before AI was even a thing:
Society advances by the number of important operations it can perform without thinking.
That’s the new steam. AI is Jevon’s Paradox in motion — the more energy we have, the more work we find for it. Steam didn’t kill horses; it gave cowboys cities to conquer. Same now: AI isn’t ending jobs, it’s evolving them.
The mistake companies make? They roll out AI like a top-down IT policy. What they need are AI Champions — the internal influencers who live in the spreadsheets, the ones curious enough to explore, fail, and iterate.
You can’t outsource adoption. You can’t birth change from a PowerPoint. You need people who own it, who lead the transformation like coaches, not autocrats.
Phil Jackson couldn’t dunk, but he could run the Triangle. That’s how Champions Champion — by making the system sing.
📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6L3Aaul6BU
Alfred North Whitehead, who co-authored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, recognized the power of AI well before Godel, Church & Turing came along.
Society advances by the number of important operations it can perform without thinking.
The New Steam
Jevon’s paradox tells us that this new ability to perform operations without thinking is like the steam engine getting introduced to society.
AI is the new steam. It’s propelling value creation at the speed of light, and so a lot of people are comparing what humans do and what AI can do and are naturally predicting a Labour Apocalypse. And who could blame them…you’ve been keeping up with the activation of 402? More on that later.
Fortunately, there’s a silver lining, a lesson that we can learn from The Steam Industrial Revolution, and it’s called Jevon’s Paradox.
You see, when the steam engine was first introduced, a lot of people lamented the death of horse and carriage, the end of The Oregon Trail. What would all of the cowboys do now? Turns out, the cowboys en masse traveled into urban centers in the long run. Now they go back to the country after their first exit. Circle of Liquidity, perhaps.
Jevon’s Paradox states that the more energy we have, the more work we find for it…Every. Single Time. Every time we think we’ve solved a big problem, we find new problems for the experts in the old problems.
Jevon’s paradox describes the phenomena wherein new energy forms introduce new consumptions for that new excess in energy.
High-School Driven Developoment
When companies are implementing AI, they need to identify AI champions or AI celebrities, AI influencers within their organizations, especially the people who own the Excel spreadsheets. Because instead of making top-down autocratic implementations, we should find influencers, celebrities, and champions and empower them to use their sense of curiosity and adventure.
The Principle of Adoption
Why? Because if a parent adopts a child, they often don’t treat it like a parent who births a child. AI implementations are broken, and we don’t achieve a continuous transformation because we don’t have AI champions in the community leading the charge, birthing the change. They need the autonomy to explore and adventure because we’re going from genesis to custom to product to commodity, according to Wardley Maps.
We have to match and evolve our approaches to institutional adoption as technology changes, and this living transformation can only occur when Champions Champion. Phil Jackson can’t dunk, but he knows how to run the Triangle Offense. See the difference?
