According to Inc, the article details the personal and professional journey of Agiloft’s CEO in adopting AI. His pivotal moment came not from corporate strategy but from using AI tools to create music visuals and a virtual tutor, accelerating his own creative skills. This personal experience led him to encourage all employees at the contract lifecycle management company to explore AI in their own lives, fostering curiosity over fear. This grassroots approach evolved into an internal AI Council, which later scaled into a formal AI Opsteam to spread successful ideas. A key outcome was a customer using Agiloft’s prompt lab to build an AI agent that streamlined contract security reviews, achieving 100% compliance and faster turnaround. The core argument is that the real challenge of becoming “AI native” is a human, not technological, transformation.
The Human Spark Behind Tech Adoption
Here’s the thing that most tech rollouts get wrong: they start with the tool, not the person. This CEO’s story flips that script entirely. It’s a powerful reminder that the most profound tech adoption often begins as a personal passion project. When you’re tinkering with AI to make cool music visuals for your brother, there’s no pressure, no ROI dashboard, no fear of failure. It’s just pure, unadulterated curiosity. And that’s the exact feeling you need to replicate inside a company if you want people to genuinely embrace a new, potentially intimidating technology.
So why does this approach work? Because it bypasses the corporate immune system—the natural resistance to mandated change. Telling an employee they must learn a new AI tool for quarterly efficiency is a chore. Inviting them to see if it can help them write a better birthday poem, plan a vacation, or, yes, make some art? That’s an adventure. It transforms the tech from a threat to their job into a partner in their life. That shift in perspective is everything.
Scaling Curiosity Without Killing It
The transition from the “music room” to the “boardroom” is where most good ideas die. But the Agiloft path—from an informal AI Council of tinkerers to a structured Opsteam—is a pretty clever blueprint. It respects the organic, bottom-up nature of discovery while providing a framework to scale what works. The critical point is that the council’s goal wasn’t to set policy. It was to learn, share, and inspire. That’s a culture hack. You’re not building a committee; you’re cultivating a community of internal evangelists who got there on their own steam.
This is crucial for stakeholder impact. For developers and product teams, it means AI features are more likely to be born from real, user-identified friction points (like that week-long security review bottleneck) rather than top-down mandates. For enterprise customers, the outcome is solutions that actually make their humans happier, because the solving philosophy is human-centric. The contract review agent isn’t about replacing the security team; it’s about freeing them from tedious first-pass reviews so they can focus on the complex, high-value stuff. That’s how you get buy-in.
The Real Silo AI Breaks
The article touches on a subtle but massive point: AI forces a re-think of organizational boundaries. Most companies are structured around functional silos—marketing, finance, legal. But work, the actual *flow* of getting things done, cuts horizontally across all of them. AI naturally operates on that workflow level. It doesn’t care about your department’s P&L; it sees the process. The example of the contract agent is perfect. It solved a problem that lived in the no-man’s-land *between* the contract requestor and the security team, a gap that was causing delays and non-compliance.
This has huge implications. We’re asking employees to think less about their title and more about their role in a workflow. That’s a fundamental mindset shift. For leaders, it means championing cross-functional projects and rewarding outcomes over territorial ownership. The companies that figure this out won’t just be automating tasks; they’ll be redesigning their entire operating model to be more fluid and connected. And honestly, that’s a transformation worth pursuing even without AI.
Leadership’s New Role: The Curiosity Catalyst
So what’s the CEO’s job in all this? It’s not to be the head of IT or the AI expert. It’s to be the chief curiosity officer. Their story is the permission slip. When the boss talks about his AI music tutor messing up a chord progression but helping him learn faster, it makes it safe for everyone else to share their experiments and failures. The pressure to “become AI native” is real, but this reframes it. You’re not buying a platform; you’re cultivating a new capability.
My take? This is the only sustainable path forward. A top-down, fear-based mandate might get some tools installed, but it will create resentment and surface-level compliance. A curiosity-led, bottom-up movement creates genuine understanding and innovation. It acknowledges the human truth that we protect what we help create. The final line says it all: “The best agents, the smartest models, the fastest tools… all rely on people who are curious enough to ask the right questions.” You can’t order that. You have to inspire it. And sometimes, inspiration starts with a simple beat.
