I was talking to an executive last week who had just decided to roll out Claude Cowork across their company. The tool decision was made. They were excited. And they were stuck on one thing: they wanted to stand up a cross-functional team to drive the rollout, and they could not figure out who to appoint from each department.
You are looking for two different kinds of people, and you need both.
One is a champion, a leader in each department who owns AI for that group and drives it from the front. The other is a super user, the person who actually does the building. Right now that group is tiny.
According to Section AI's research, just 0.1% of employees have reached the point where they build AI workflows others can use, and the reason is not missing talent. It is that almost no one has been given the job.1
In the issue last week, I said your Tier 2 candidates are already on your team. The fastest way to accelerate adoption is to find the super users who are already operating a level above everyone else, and put real weight behind them. This issue is how you spot them.
💡 By default, AI helps one person at a time.
Tier 2 is the deliberate work of turning one person's system into the team's.
Before we get into it, I am excited to share that I am running another free Maven Lightning Lesson, Think in Workflows: Agentic AI for Business Leaders, where we dig into why thinking in end-to-end workflows is where the real leverage with AI lives. If that is the shift you are trying to make with your team, come join us.
A champion leads it. Super users make it scale.
Take that executive's question: who do you appoint from each department? Part of the answer is straightforward. Every group needs a champion, the person who leads AI in that function. Name them, make them the face of it, give them the mandate. You should appoint one.
But a champion is not what makes adoption scale. A champion spreads enthusiasm and gets people to try the tool. It is not the same as building systems the team can actually run. Left alone, AI makes individuals faster and stops there. The gains stay personal and never compound into anything the team owns.
Super users are what change that: the people who sit just below the champion and rebuild the work itself. They turn a private win into a shared system. That is how individual AI becomes team AI. Continue below to read how to spot them.
One caution before the how. It is tempting to let IT or your data and analytics team own these workflows. Do not. They are essential for the custom builds - the Tier 3 work mentioned in this issue . But getting a whole team to use AI in their daily work belongs to the people inside that team, not to a central technical function.
The framework: find them, then clear the path
This has two halves. The first is finding these people. The second is clearing their path so they can build for the team.
Part one: who they actually are
Your super users are usually the people who were already your most productive, the curious ones who poke at every new tool. It is rarely about tenure or job title. They were getting more done than their peers before AI, and AI just widened the gap.
Three tells give them away:
They build things nobody asked them to build. A spreadsheet that updates itself, a draft generator, a little workflow that quietly saves them an hour a day.
They test new tools before you roll anything out. They have already tried the thing you are about to introduce.
They ask whether AI can reach your internal systems. They are thinking about connection and workflow, not just chat.
Part two: clear the path
Finding them changes nothing on its own. Right now they build for themselves, on their own time, with no mandate to build for anyone else. To change that, give them three things:
Permission to build for others, named out loud. Not "keep doing your clever thing." Instead: "Your job now includes making this work for the team."
Protected time to do it. A couple of hours a week, on the calendar, defended. Without it, building for the team competes with their actual job and loses every time.
A route to share what they build, so one person's workflow can become the team's default instead of staying on their laptop. The point is simply that the path has to exist.
That is the whole framework: find them, then clear the path. The clearing is what makes it spread, and it is usually the part that gets left out.
The super user spotter
Before you name anyone to the team, look across each department for these signs. The person showing most of them is your Tier 2, regardless of title.
What this gets you
This is the manager multiplier, and it is why Tier 2 matters more than the other two tiers.
The payoff is the multiplier. The few who can build pull the next group up behind them, so the team's output climbs without adding a single new hire. One super user who is given permission and time can change how an entire department works. That is leverage you cannot buy with another seat license.
Before you go
This issue is one slice of a bigger question: where does your team actually stand with AI, and what should you fix first? That is what the Clarity Audit is for. In sixty minutes, free and no pitch, we look across your leadership buy-in, your data and systems, what AI your team is actually using, and your day-to-day workflows. You leave with a clear read on where you stand and the top one to three workflows worth redesigning first, in a short report that is yours to keep.
What leaders should know
A few years ago, IKEA's chatbot Billie started handling about 47% of customer calls. Instead of cutting the call centre, IKEA reskilled 8,500 of those workers into remote interior design advisors. The new advisory service grew into a €1.3 billion revenue stream, and none of those roles were cut to get there.
So what: This is how people-first companies win with AI. They don't ask "what do we cut?" they ask "what can our people do now?" That is a leadership choice!!
Sources:
1 Section AI, AI Proficiency Report, January 2026
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See you next week - Purti
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