How we bring 150 people along on our AI journey
And the interesting mistakes we made on the way.
"Just a few things before you start."
This is what we ask of a colleague who just wants to do their job.
Everyone gets an account. That is not a strategy. That is a subscription.
We are Voys.
- 150 colleagues
- 33,000 customers
- steward-owned
- self-managing since 2012
We live by the experiment: make interesting mistakes and learn fast.
So we said: go experiment. And they did.
Projects everywhere.
Great ideas, and nobody could find them.
Then came the fight.
Staging exists to test our product. Suddenly it also ran everyone's internal tools. Both sides had a point.
Running for months. Owned by no one.
Projects kept running unattended, in the wrong place, long after anyone looked at them.
And every tool looked different.
Every new tool invented its own layout and its own house style.
Building got cheap. Finding, running and maintaining did not.
Where do your people already ask questions all day?
In the chat tool they already use. Only there, they ask people.
So AI becomes a colleague in the channel.
It asks what a good colleague would ask: what exactly, how often, with which systems, for whom.
Nobody installs anything.
You ask the way you would ask a colleague. You don't need to know which system does the work.
One front door. Four kinds of questions.
1 · Knowledge
"I want to know something."
Our knowledge lives in Notion, written for people. For AI that turned out to be a mess. You have to prepare it first: AI information architecture. We use Klai for that.
2 · Skill
"Do this for me."
A skill is a written recipe that teaches the AI how we do one job. If the skill exists, the chat helps you find it. If it doesn't, you build it together.
3 · Workflow
"Do this every time."
Fixed steps where the process is fixed, an AI step where it gets messy, a person where a decision is needed. It reports back by itself: "I did this for you. I have one question."
An admin wires up the connections once. Everyone else just talks.
4 · Software
"I need a tool of my own."
For anything that stays the same, software is faster, cheaper and leaner than AI. In Garage you see your tool and ask for changes in a chat box. A coding agent builds it in the background.
AI finds the route. Then we pave it, and we maintain it.
Think of a new colleague. The first time, they think about every step. By the tenth time, it's a checklist.
What runs behind the door.
Open source wherever we can.
One of them, from the inside: Claire.
Claire reviews the merge requests our developers ask her to. She started as a single skill.
Four choices we would make again.
- 1Code decides whether she runs. Nothing starts unless someone asked.
- 2Her knowledge is plain Markdown. Odd comment? Open the file.
- 3She never holds a password. Assume she'll be fooled.
- 4Rules have to earn their place. A new rule starts on probation and retires when people stop acting on it.
What Claire changed.
About 98 engineer hours saved a month.
An estimate. We check it with a survey in December.
One place to run it all.
Yolodeck is our hosting platform for internal tools. Not the product platform. Not a server at home. One place, one login, one way to ship.
Where we are today.
Every component is tested and works. Now we connect them.
Paving means maintaining.
- Everything has an owner
- Problems go to a shared channel, not one inbox
- Keys belong to the tool, not to a person
- Unused for 90 days? Switched off
- Look before you build
- One design system, so every tool looks like ours
Technology is the easy half.
Four levels of AI fluency.
You don't jump levels. You aim one level up, in one part of your work.
We learn it together.
- A frontier member in every team
- Garage sessions every other Wednesday: five-minute demos, before and after
- Time you are allowed to spend on this
We don't count how often you use AI. We count what changed.
What about jobs?
Herald took over translation work worth two full-time jobs. Those two colleagues now help everyone else do more with AI.
More with the same people. Not the same with fewer.
Three things for Monday.
- 1Pick one front door: the chat tool your people already use.
- 2Sort the questions into four: know, do, repeat, build.
- 3Give everything an owner and a home.
Don't bring your people to AI. Bring AI to where your people already work.
Thank you.story.markvletter.com/ai-strategyMark Vletter, Voys