01 SIGNATURE MOVE
We start with listening, not surveys.
Surveys give you what people are willing to write down. Listening sessions give you what they actually think. The difference matters at every step that follows.
A focused engagement from Ideal State
Adoption is more than people using tools. It’s the practice that counts.
Most AI adoption work is a one-day training and a launch checklist. We build the institutional muscle that turns AI into a core competency. Change management. Knowledge management. The Trailblazers Program. The disciplines AI made urgent, done by the firm that has been practicing these methods since 2016.
The pattern
Shadow AI is already in your organization. The clear alternative is not.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 65% of AI users fear falling behind if they do not use AI, yet only 13% say their organization rewards them for reinventing work with AI. Gartner’s 2026 Global Labor Market Survey found that by 2027, half of all enterprises without a people-centric AI strategy will lose their top AI talent. Both studies surveyed tens of thousands of workers. Both arrived at the same diagnosis. The gap between what employees are already doing with AI and what the organization is set up to support is the largest gap in enterprise technology right now.
You probably already have:
- 01 Staff using Copilot, ChatGPT, or Claude on their own time, without an organizational policy.
- 02 A handful of internal AI champions whose enthusiasm is not yet connected to a strategic program.
- 03 Leaders who cannot articulate what AI has produced for the organization, or should produce.
- 04 Anxiety about getting AI wrong, paired with a strong sense that doing nothing is also wrong.
This is the pattern. AI adoption is not a training problem. It is the discipline of building the institutional practice that turns employee energy into compounding capability.
How we work
Listen first. Then look. Then build the practice.
Most adoption work starts with the tool. We start with the people who will be using the tool. Before we recommend anything, we run listening sessions with the people who will live with the change. We map their hopes, fears, and dreams, in the actual words they use, before we design the rollout. Sara’s two decades in knowledge management and qualitative research are the methodology. The internal practice they produce is the deliverable.
Then we look at the systems. The data hygiene. The SharePoint and Teams environments AI will draw from. The places where AI usage is already happening and the places where it is not.
Then we build the practice. The Trailblazers Program. The AI Adoption Hub. The change communication. The governance committee. The training that scales with AI adoption and evolution rather than slowing it down. The rhythms your team will own when we leave.
02 SIGNATURE MOVE
We map hopes, fears, and dreams before we touch the tech.
The hopes are the use cases. The fears are the change-management work. The dreams are where AI produces real business impact. All three have to be understood before any rollout can succeed.
03 SIGNATURE MOVE
We create heroes, not martyrs.
Adoption goes badly when the rollout makes ordinary employees feel small. We design every change so the people on the receiving end become more capable and proud, not bewildered or behind.
Our signature program
We do not just train users. We develop AI builders.
The Trailblazers Program is a centerpiece of most Rollout & Adoption engagements. It is also fully embedded in Transform365 for clients who want the managed-service version.
The program takes AI-curious employees and develops them into capable AI builders. People who can scope and ship vetted AI solutions inside the organization. Graduates mentor the next cohort and become the AI talent your organization will rely on long after the engagement ends.
Most adoption efforts stop at “trained users.” Trailblazers is the next phase. It is the difference between a workforce that has been introduced to AI and a workforce that owns it.
80%
Less time on HR
info requests
info requests
Trailblazers: the spark that lights the fire
One Trailblazer shipped a SharePoint-based knowledge-base agent in eight weeks that now answers staff HR questions across all twenty-five departments. No IT background, never built an AI agent before. As a graduate, she is now advising other departments on how to build similar tools.
Trailblazers is also one of the four parallel tracks inside Transform365. Read the full description on the Transform365 page →
The decades-old discipline AI made urgent
AI without knowledge management is hallucination at scale.
The thing most consulting firms treat as cleanup is the thing that makes AI useful. Copilot draws from your SharePoint, your Teams, your OneDrive, your meeting transcripts, your emails. If the underlying content is messy, outdated, or scattered, the AI produces fluent answers based on the wrong content. The model is doing what models do. The problem is upstream.
Knowledge management is the discipline of organizing what an institution knows so that the people who need it can find it and act on it. It has been a named discipline since the 1990s. Sara Teitelman has been practicing it since the 2000s. Her work as a director of knowledge management before founding Ideal State is the backbone of the firm’s methodology. The book Zen and the Art of Digital Transformation (Wiley, 2025) lays out the long-form practice.
In an AI Rollout & Adoption engagement, knowledge management is not a separate workstream. It is integrated into the adoption practice from the first listening session forward. We surface the content that needs to be migrated, the data that needs to be classified, the conversations that need to be captured, and the institutional knowledge that needs to be findable before AI can amplify it. The clean information environment is what AI thrives on.
The work
What this looks like in real organizations.
CLIENT STORY · 01
82% active Copilot usage
A Copilot habit on $1.5B in active projects.
Turned Copilot from a feature into a daily habit across the firm. A 59-member internal Copilot community runs without us in the room. Construction-specific use cases in production.
Model Group · Commercial real estate CLIENT STORY · 02
+2yrs and still running
A Tech Ambassador program that outlasted the engagement.
The adoption program we stood up during the engagement is now training each new cohort of staff, two years after we left. The capability stuck.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation · Philanthropy TRAILBLAZER STORY · PLACEHOLDER
80% less time on HR requests
A Trailblazer who became an internal AI builder.
A Trailblazer shipped a SharePoint-based knowledge-base agent in eight weeks that now answers staff HR questions across all twenty-five departments. (Named version forthcoming.)
Trailblazer · Story to come
The shape of the work
The shape of an AI Rollout & Adoption engagement.
AI Rollout & Adoption is a project engagement, typically three to twelve months depending on the size of the organization and the ambition of the program. It is often followed by Transform365 (the managed-service version of the same work, ongoing rather than time-bound) or paired with Microsoft 365 Optimization (the clean foundation that AI compounds on). It can also stand alone for organizations with a clean environment and capable team that just needs some surge capacity to get the AI rollout off to a strong start.
Most engagements include some combination of:
- 01 A discovery phase grounded in listening sessions and workshops, not surveys.
- 02 A change strategy and communication plan tailored to your organization’s actual decision-making patterns.
- 03 The Trailblazers Program cohort, with named participants, scoped projects, and concrete outcomes.
- 04 A knowledge management framework integrated with the rollout: data hygiene, content lifecycle, data classification.
- 05 Training and support that scales rather than front-loaded at launch.
- 06 An AI governance committee or working group your team will own after we leave.
Engagements vary, but each one is designed so that the practice continues to produce value long after we leave.
Connect with us
Find out where your
Find out where your
AI adoption practice stands.
If your staff is already using Copilot, ChatGPT, or Claude and the institution has not caught up, the AI Readiness Assessment is the right first step. It is free, it takes five business days, and it gives your leadership a clear picture of where you stand and what to do in the next 30 days.
A 30-minute call with one of our co-founders. No consultant-speak. No pressure. Let’s explore some possibilities together.
Or read Zen and the Art of Digital Transformation before you decide.