Making AI Stick: Incentives, Culture and Ownership
How a 25-person consulting team moved from hesitant, uneven AI use to becoming a leading contributor to adoption across the wider organisation, by pairing senior clarity with incentives, coaching and light-touch governance.
Service
Strategy
Client
Cowater International
Focus
Incentives & Change
Year
2025
Do you face
similar challenges?
[THE PROBLEM]
Cowater had been discussing AI for over a year, and had invested in an AI roll-out, but this had not yet translated into practical change at scale. Experimentation was uneven and often private, there was no shared view on the potential for operational value, and there was no clear mechanism for turning individual trials into shared practice. People were curious, but incentives to experiment and share were weak.
AI use has moved from something easy to ignore to something [expected]
Jon Faulkner
Managing Director, Cowater UK
Paradigm Junction helped us move from isolated experimentation to shared ways of working with AI. We quickly realised that the main blocker was not enthusiasm, but a lack of clarity about what was allowed or encouraged by senior leadership. The introduction of clear senior signalling and simple rules had a real impact on what people felt able to try and discuss openly. The AI Demo Day created momentum, and the hands-on coaching meant teams were solving their own problems and building lasting capability. Just as importantly, the team now owns what was built and is confident in continuing this work themselves.
[ our approach ]
How we solved the problem
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Listen and Map
We held one-to-one conversations with every team member to understand how work was done, where AI was already being used and where uncertainty remained.
These conversations mapped formal and informal workflows, surfaced where AI could remove friction immediately, and identified a consistent gap between high curiosity and unclear permission and structure.
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Clear Guardrails
We worked with senior leadership to make expectations explicit and develop proportionate guidance for using AI confidently and responsibly.
The guidance clarified what was acceptable, when enterprise tools should be used and how AI use should be disclosed, making experimentation easier while maintaining confidence in quality and risk management.
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Align Incentives
We designed incentives that rewarded practical use and encouraged people to share concrete improvements to everyday workflows.
The AI Demo Day required each participant to present a workflow improvement, supported by prizes and peer recognition, while weekly office days, open drop-ins, lunch sessions and practical email tips kept experimentation visible and accessible.
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Transfer Ownership
We packaged the tools and processes developed during the programme so the team could continue using and improving them independently.
We prepared tools for reuse, handed them to named owners, documented processes and templates, and supported the handover with simple, practical guidance.
[ CLIENT RESULTS ]
Our work in numbers
Use of the company’s enterprise AI tool increased from 67% to every member of the team.
100%
Enterprise tool adoption
Twenty practical workflow improvements were submitted at demo day, creating visible momentum around AI use.
20
Demo day entries
Automations were assigned to named owners in the Cowater team who demonstrated them weekly on global company calls.
7
Working automations
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