What is an AI Champion?

An AI Champion is a staff member — not necessarily in IT — who develops practical AI competency, demonstrates AI use in their own work, coaches colleagues, provides feedback on AI tool adoption, and serves as a bridge between the transformation team and the broader organization. They are trusted peers who make AI feel accessible rather than threatening.

How are AI Champions selected?

We look for enthusiasm, influence, and credibility — not technical background. The best champions are respected by their peers, curious about new approaches, and willing to experiment. We work with department leaders to identify candidates, but participation is voluntary. Forced participation undermines the program's credibility.

What does the certification program include?

The program runs over 8-12 weeks and includes practical AI skills training, coaching techniques, change management fundamentals, a hands-on project applying AI to a real workflow in their department, and certification assessment. Champions meet weekly in a cohort format and complete between-session assignments.

How many champions does an organization need?

We recommend one champion per 25-40 staff members, distributed across departments and organizational levels. A 500-person organization typically needs 12-20 champions to achieve adequate coverage. Larger organizations benefit from a tiered model with senior champions who coordinate departmental champion networks.

What happens after certification?

Certified champions join an ongoing Champions Network with quarterly refresher sessions, access to new AI developments and tools, a peer support community, and a direct channel to the transformation team. The network ensures that AI advocacy continues long after the formal engagement ends.

What is an AI Champion?

An AI Champion is a staff member — not necessarily in IT — who develops practical AI competency, demonstrates AI use in their own work, coaches colleagues, provides feedback on AI tool adoption, and serves as a bridge between the transformation team and the broader organization. They are trusted peers who make AI feel accessible rather than threatening.

How are AI Champions selected?

We look for enthusiasm, influence, and credibility — not technical background. The best champions are respected by their peers, curious about new approaches, and willing to experiment. We work with department leaders to identify candidates, but participation is voluntary. Forced participation undermines the program's credibility.

What does the certification program include?

The program runs over 8-12 weeks and includes practical AI skills training, coaching techniques, change management fundamentals, a hands-on project applying AI to a real workflow in their department, and certification assessment. Champions meet weekly in a cohort format and complete between-session assignments.

How many champions does an organization need?

We recommend one champion per 25-40 staff members, distributed across departments and organizational levels. A 500-person organization typically needs 12-20 champions to achieve adequate coverage. Larger organizations benefit from a tiered model with senior champions who coordinate departmental champion networks.

What happens after certification?

Certified champions join an ongoing Champions Network with quarterly refresher sessions, access to new AI developments and tools, a peer support community, and a direct channel to the transformation team. The network ensures that AI advocacy continues long after the formal engagement ends.

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AI Champions Certification Program

Remolda's AI Champions program identifies and develops internal AI advocates within your organization — people who bridge the gap between AI capability and organizational adoption by demonstrating practical AI use, coaching colleagues, and driving culture change from within.

Why AI Champions Matter

The most common failure pattern in AI transformation is not technical. The technology works. The strategy is sound. The implementation is completed on time. And then adoption stalls because the people who are supposed to use the new AI tools go back to doing things the old way.

This happens because transformation is designed top-down — leadership decides, IT deploys, and the rest of the organization is told to change. What is missing is the lateral influence that makes people actually want to change.

AI Champions fill this gap. They are the colleagues who demonstrate that AI works in practice, who help others get started, who translate abstract "transformation" into concrete "here is how I used this tool to save two hours on that report you also hate."

Research on organizational change consistently shows that peer influence is more powerful than executive mandates in driving sustained behavior change. AI Champions are the mechanism through which this peer influence operates.

The Remolda AI Champions Program

Who Becomes a Champion

Champions are not IT specialists. They are respected staff members from across the organization — an operations manager, a policy analyst, a clinical coordinator, a project lead — who have the curiosity to learn, the credibility to influence, and the practical sense to make AI work in real workflows.

We work with department leaders to identify potential champions, but participation is always voluntary. A champion who was forced into the role has no credibility with the peers they are supposed to influence.

What They Learn

The program runs 8-12 weeks and covers:

Practical AI Skills. Hands-on training with the specific AI tools your organization is deploying. Not theory — actual use of the tools on actual workflows from their departments.

Coaching and Facilitation. How to help colleagues get started with AI tools, how to run informal training sessions, how to address common concerns and resistance, and how to provide constructive feedback to the transformation team.

Change Management Fundamentals. Understanding why people resist change, how to identify and address specific concerns, and how to create positive momentum within a team.

Hands-On Project. Each champion completes a project applying AI to a real workflow in their department — documenting the before-and-after, measuring the impact, and presenting results to their team. This gives them a concrete success story to reference when coaching colleagues.

Certification Assessment. Champions demonstrate competency through their project results, a practical skills assessment, and peer evaluation within the cohort.

How the Network Operates

Certified champions form an ongoing AI Champions Network:

Quarterly refresher sessions covering new AI capabilities, updated tools, and emerging best practices
Peer support community where champions share successes, troubleshoot challenges, and develop new use cases
Direct channel to the transformation team for escalating issues, requesting support, and providing ground-level feedback on adoption
Recognition and visibility within the organization — champions are acknowledged as internal experts and change leaders

The Impact

Organizations with active AI Champions Networks see measurably higher adoption rates compared to organizations that rely solely on top-down training and mandated use.

The champions effect is particularly powerful in three situations:

Skeptical teams. When a respected peer demonstrates genuine benefit from AI tools, skeptics are more likely to try than when the message comes from management or IT.

Complex workflows. When AI application is not obvious — when it requires creative thinking about how to apply general tools to specific work — champions provide the practical examples and guidance that generic training cannot.

Sustained adoption. Initial enthusiasm fades. Champions maintain momentum by continuing to model AI use, celebrate team successes, and help colleagues overcome the frustration of the learning curve.

Industries Where Champions Programs Are Most Effective

Government: Large organizations with diverse departments, union environments, and resistance to externally mandated change benefit significantly from peer-led adoption.

Healthcare: Clinical staff adoption of AI tools depends heavily on credible peer influence. A physician champion is far more persuasive than an IT presentation.

Education: Faculty adoption of AI follows peer influence patterns. Faculty champions who demonstrate genuine productivity improvement influence their departments more effectively than institutional mandates.

Financial Services: Compliance-oriented cultures respond well to champions who demonstrate that AI tools can be used within regulatory guardrails.

Delivery Process

Step 1: Candidate Identification and Programme Design (Weeks 1–2). We work with department leaders and HR to identify potential AI Champion candidates — respected staff members across departments and levels who have the curiosity, credibility, and communication skills to influence their peers. We present a recommended cohort of candidates (typically 8–20 for a first programme) for leadership review. Simultaneously, we design the programme content around the specific AI tools being deployed and the workflows of the participating champions' departments.

Step 2: Cohort Kickoff and Skills Development (Weeks 2–6). Weekly cohort sessions of 2–3 hours combining practical AI skills training, coaching technique development, and change management fundamentals. Each session applies learning directly to the AI tools the champion's colleagues will use. Between sessions, champions complete assignments that apply skills in their actual work — documenting the process and outcomes to build their coaching portfolio.

Step 3: Hands-On Projects (Weeks 5–10). Each champion undertakes a structured project applying AI to a real workflow in their department. We provide coaching support for project design and execution. Projects are designed to produce a documented before-and-after with measured outcomes — giving champions a concrete success story they can use when coaching colleagues.

Step 4: Certification Assessment and Network Activation (Weeks 10–12). Champions complete a practical skills assessment, present their project results to the cohort, and receive peer evaluation feedback. Certified champions are formally recognised within the organisation and onboarded to the AI Champions Network with its ongoing support structures.

Typical Engagement

Duration: 10–12 weeks from candidate identification to certification for a cohort of 8–20 champions. Larger organisations may run multiple cohorts sequentially or in parallel. The Champions Network continues indefinitely with quarterly Remolda-facilitated refresh sessions.

What the client needs to provide: Leadership commitment to identify and release champion candidates from other obligations during the programme; executive recognition and visible sponsorship of the programme; access to the AI tools being deployed for champion training; a designated programme coordinator to manage scheduling and logistics.

What Remolda provides: Candidate selection support, full programme design and facilitation, coaching support for hands-on projects, certification assessment, and ongoing Champions Network facilitation including quarterly refresher sessions and the peer support community platform.

Technology & Integrations

AI Champions are trained on the specific AI tools your organisation is deploying — not generic AI literacy. This includes Microsoft 365 Copilot (Word, Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint AI integration), Google Workspace Gemini, and any sector-specific AI platforms relevant to the champion cohort's departments. For organisations deploying custom AI systems — internal chatbots, document processing pipelines, or workflow automation agents — we include hands-on training on those systems so champions are the most capable users in their teams before they begin coaching colleagues. The Champions Network operates on a dedicated collaboration platform (typically a private Microsoft Teams channel or Slack workspace depending on the organisation's infrastructure) with structured discussion forums, a shared resource library, and a direct channel to the Remolda transformation team. For larger organisations, we implement a tiered network structure with senior champions maintaining sub-group networks using your existing collaboration tools.

Canadian Regulatory Context

AI Champions programmes in Canadian regulated sectors need to address the specific obligations and concerns that make AI adoption more complex in these environments. For federal government departments, champions must be prepared to answer colleagues' questions about the policy and regulatory boundaries of AI use — including what information may not be entered into cloud-hosted AI tools under the Policy on Government Security, when AI-assisted content triggers obligations under the Directive on Automated Decision-Making, and what verification requirements apply to AI-assisted content in both official languages under the Official Languages Act. Champions who can confidently address these questions reduce the anxiety that prevents adoption in government environments. For healthcare organisations, champions from clinical settings must understand the professional regulatory guidance on AI use relevant to their regulated profession — physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals each have distinct obligations that shape how AI tools may be used in their work. We incorporate this regulatory literacy into champion training so that peer coaching reinforces responsible use rather than inadvertently encouraging non-compliant behaviour.

Further reading: AI Transformation Fails Without Culture | Change Management for AI