Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
A Tech Ambassador program built during the engagement, still running two years later, training each new staff cohort.
Read the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation story Transform365 · Featured case
Commercial · Urban development · $1.5B in active projects
A Copilot habit on $1.5B in active development.
82% active Copilot usage firmwide.
The situation
The situation we walked into.
Model Group is a national urban development firm with roughly $1.5B in active development projects across a portfolio of mixed-use, residential, and commercial work. The firm had purchased Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses for the team six months before they reached out to us. The IT group had rolled out the licenses and given people the standard introduction. Adoption was patchy. A handful of power users were doing impressive things in Outlook and Excel. Everyone else had mostly forgotten the licenses existed. Leadership could not articulate what AI had produced for the firm, and the construction-specific workflows where AI could compound (RFP responses, vendor compliance documentation, project meeting summaries, design review consolidation) had not been touched.
What we did
What we did.
We started with listening sessions. Across departments, across roles. Project managers, finance leads, BD, design, the operations and compliance team. We mapped the hopes, fears, and dreams of the people who would have to live with the change before we recommended any change. The patterns were clear within two weeks: the firm had bought a productivity tool and what they actually needed was a transformation practice.
The engagement was structured as a Transform365 subscription. We stood up the AI Adoption Hub inside their Teams environment as the home base for the practice. We configured M365 governance for the data Copilot was about to surface. We identified the first Trailblazers cohort, drawn from project management, finance, and business development. Each Trailblazer scoped a real use case tied to their actual work.
The cohort shipped real, vetted solutions during the engagement. RFP response acceleration that cut a multi-day drafting cycle to hours. Vendor compliance documentation that pulled the standard certifications and surfaced the gaps before submissions went out. Post-meeting decision summaries automatically routed into project records so the institutional memory caught up with the meeting cadence. Design review consolidation that synthesized markup across three or four reviewer comments into a single working document.
Alongside the cohort, we ran a monthly leadership review with the firm’s senior team. The review tracked usage, surfaced what was working, and decided what the next month should focus on. The rhythm was deliberate: cohort produces, leadership sees, firm learns, next cycle starts.
What changed
What changed.
Active Copilot usage went from a low baseline to 82% firmwide. The internal Copilot community, which started as the first Trailblazers cohort, grew organically to 59 members across departments who meet weekly to share prompts, use cases, and shipping wins. The construction-specific use cases the cohort shipped during the engagement are now in production and continue to evolve as the community refines them. The AI Adoption Hub is the firm’s home base for AI questions, prompts, and shared learning. Leadership has the monthly dashboard that lets them articulate, in plain language, what AI is actually producing for the firm.
The human moment
Ideal State’s structured approach is turning AI from a concept into a practical tool for our team, enhancing how we build thriving communities.David Roberts, Chief Development Officer, Model Group
What sticks
What sticks.
The internal Copilot community runs the practice without us. They meet weekly. They onboard new colleagues into AI usage. They identify and ship new construction-specific use cases as the work evolves. The governance framework we configured is owned by their IT leadership. The Trailblazers playbook is documented in the AI Adoption Hub and continues to be used as the firm onboards new staff. The monthly leadership rhythm has become the firm’s default way of governing technology decisions, not only AI ones. The transformation sticks without us in the room.
Lessons we carried forward
Lessons we carried forward.
The engagement crystallized something we had been moving toward for years: domain-specific use cases beat generic productivity demos every time. The construction-specific workflows landed because they were tied to the actual work the firm did, not to abstract “productivity gains.” We now lead every commercial engagement by finding the three to five workflows that matter most to the buyer’s operations, and we build the AI capability around those. It made the work faster, more credible, and more durable. We owe Model Group for proving the approach.
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