AI Transformation Playbook: Practical Lessons from our AI-First Journey | Make | RAISE Summit 2026

Company Profile & Achievement:

• Make is a SaaS scale-up of approximately 300 employees specializing in visual workflow automation.
• As of January, 96% of employees build and use their own AI agents, up from 16% prior to the AI bar initiative.
• The organization transitioned from a general automation company to an AI-first entity over a 2.5-year period.

Phase 1: Experimentation (Months 0–8):

• Strategy: Focused on "low-hanging fruit" with an expectation that most experiments would fail as part of organizational learning.
• Tooling Guidance: Advised against obsessing over specific toolkits due to rapid market obsolescence; recommended selecting a working tool immediately.
• Education: Launched broad AI literacy training for all employees, though noted that literacy alone did not drive adoption.
• Leadership Mandate: Introduced the "hamburger mandate" model, emphasizing that successful transformation requires engagement from leadership (top bun), employees (bottom bun), and a "meaty middle" (execution layer) rather than just top-down or bottom-up approaches.
• Project Outcomes:
  • Success: A low-complexity project notifying users of third-party API changes has run live for two years.
  • Abandonment: A high-impact automated subtitle translation project was discontinued despite initial promise.
• Team Composition: Initially driven by a two-person team (the presenter and one colleague).

Phase 2: The "Samurai" Program (Year 2):

• Team Structure: Assembled a full-time, six-person embedded AI transformation team ("Samurai team") with dedicated budget across departments.
• Operating Code (70-20-10):
  • 70% of time dedicated to hands-on implementation.
  • 20% dedicated to coaching and training others.
  • 10% dedicated to maintenance (noted as ambitious).
• Work Methodology: Introduced "Code Purple" protocol, allowing the team to invoke a two-week uninterrupted sprint to focus on a specific problem.
• Performance Benchmarking:
  • Implemented early employee benchmarking to track journey progression.
  • Enforced extreme departmental ownership to align solutions with specific problems.
  • Rejected "time saved" as a metric, requiring ties to core KPIs (revenue or cost).
• Key Projects & Metrics:
  • Post Call Hero: An AI agent automating CRM updates and stakeholder communication for sales reps, directly impacting revenue.
  • Documentation Agent: An agent increasing documentation coverage, significantly reducing customer documentation generation costs.
• Success Rate: Achieved 23 successful projects in one year (70% success rate) compared to a 5–10% industry benchmark.

Phase 3: The "AI Bar" (Year 2.5):

• Initiative: Established a mandatory quarterly learning and building requirement for every employee to address previous gaps in enablement.
• Milestone Structure: Employees choose from categorized milestones (Learning, Building, Sharing) based on their proficiency and role.
• Adoption Response:
  • Initial employee hesitation was observed, but sentiment shifted positively in subsequent quarters.
  • 87% of employees surveyed rated the AI bar as a positive experience.
  • No attrition occurred due to the mandate; employees reported feeling more appreciated.
• Impact on Collaboration: Resulted in a massive increase in peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Future Outlook (Phase 4):

• Priority: Shifting focus to "context management" to centralize knowledge and enable builders to easily access existing assets.
• Self-Sustaining Model: The system has evolved into a self-enforcing machine where the Samurai team identifies individual projects and scales them enterprise-wide.
• Long-term Stat: 73% of projects implemented impact core business KPIs across every department.
• Current State: Two years post-inception, the organization no longer debates AI adoption; the focus is purely on implementation and scale.