If you could create your own fantasy board of directors, who would be on it? CO— connects you with thought leaders from across the business spectrum and asks them to help solve your biggest business challenges. In this edition, we ask the founder of an AI training company how you can seamlessly incorporate AI into your workflows.
In this edition of “Ask the Board,” we feature Boz Vitanova, Founder and CEO of TeamLift. Founded in 2021, TeamLift provides one-on-one AI training for small businesses. If you’re ready to integrate AI into your organization, check out what Boz has to say:
Most AI advice aimed at small businesses assumes you should do what big companies do, just smaller. Buy licenses for everyone. Run mandatory training. Set adoption targets. I'd push back on that.
The enterprise playbook is failing inside the enterprise. Pilots stall, licenses go unused, "transformation" becomes a slide in a deck. Small businesses can skip that whole detour. This is what actually works:
Stop trying to get everyone on AI
The story we keep hearing is that every employee will learn to work with AI. They won't. A handful are curious about new tools and will lean in. Most won't, and no amount of training will change that.
Pretending otherwise is comfortable because it lets you skip the harder conversation about who actually will, and that avoidance is the reason most rollouts stall. The starting point is to identify the few people who will run with this and invest in them.
Bigger isn’t always better
Big companies are stuck rolling AI out to thousands of people through committees, IT tickets, and procurement cycles. You can identify the right people, give them the support they need, and have working AI solutions in weeks.
Speed is your advantage. The companies that win the next decade will be small teams of high-ownership people building real things.
People who watch a teammate save ten hours a week with AI come around on their own. People who get mandated into AI training before they're ready resist it. Pull beats push.Boz Vitanova, Founder and CEO of TeamLift
Find your Champions
Look for “Champions,” or the people on your team with three specific traits. They're comfortable experimenting. They're already high performers, so the workflows they automate are worth scaling. And they finish what they start. That last one matters more than people think.
AI is full of shiny objects, and the people you want are the ones who build the workflow, deploy it, and then build the next one. Not the people who get excited about three things and ghost on all of them.
How many Champions? Roughly one for every ten employees. If you have 15 people, pick two. If you have 50, pick five. Look in process-heavy roles such as operations, support, and finance, where the friction is high and the wins are visible
Invest in your Champions the right way
Once you've found them, skip the group courses or on-demand videos. Generic AI training does not produce Champions. What works is pairing each Champion with an AI instructor. Not a consultant who delivers a strategy deck, not a trainer who runs a class, but someone who builds the workflow with your Champion, using their data and their tools.
In the first few weeks, the Champion should have one AI workflow running that gives them hours back every week. That win does more for adoption than any training program.
Let your Champions pull the team in
Use your Champions' AI wins to attract curiosity rather than force participation. This is where small businesses have another advantage. You don't have a board demanding "100% AI adoption" by next quarter. This can happen organically with a few people leading and others joining when they see it work.
People who watch a teammate save ten hours a week with AI come around on their own. People who get mandated into AI training before they're ready resist it. Pull beats push.
Measure hours, not licenses
The enterprise tracks "AI adoption" by counting how many seats are activated. That's a vanity metric. The real measure is how many hours your Champions have unlocked for your business, and what they are now able to do with those hours.
If the answer is "the hours we unlocked are now going to higher-value work," you have a real result. If the answer is "everyone is on Copilot," you have a line item. Track the first one.
CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.
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