Give champions time to do the work
A champion network needs time in people’s working week. I have seen Claude rollout plans recruit volunteers, open a chat channel and assume the network will take care of itself. The volunteers then have to choose between this new responsibility and the work their managers already expect. Before recruiting anyone, I want a description of the role, an agreed time commitment and a route for getting problems resolved.
I learned the underlying lesson long before generative AI. When we rolled out digital banking platforms to millions of customers, the branch and operations staff who carried the change were the ones with a defined role, a manager who protected their time, and a clear place to send problems. Enthusiasm got people into the room. A job description kept them there.
Write a one-page role agreement with explicit limits
A champion should be someone colleagues can approach with a real work problem, not the person who posts most often about new models. Their service has four parts: gather recurring questions, demonstrate approved examples, report friction, and route unresolved issues to an accountable owner. Champions are translators between daily work and the people responsible for delivery.
The boundaries matter as much as the duties. A champion cannot grant access, declare a metric correct, approve a new connector, or promise a delivery date. In a regulated institution, that line keeps the network from becoming an informal shadow of the access management and data governance functions your CISO and examiners expect to see. Agree a realistic time allocation with each champion's manager, in writing. Without it, you are taxing your most helpful employees until they quit the role quietly.
Recruit across workflows, including a skeptic
Choose representatives from the work you intend to improve. A finance champion who knows the close calendar contributes something different from a sales operations champion who understands why opportunity stages drift. In healthcare and life sciences, a revenue cycle or clinical operations lead brings constraints a technologist will miss, especially around HIPAA and minimum necessary access.
Include a skeptical practitioner who knows the work and is willing to challenge an answer. Start with a group small enough to compare examples together, tied to the workflows the pilot actually supports. Add people when another team has a defined need and its manager can protect their time. Recruiting a representative from every department can create coordination work before there is useful work for them to do.
Make intake concrete and safe to share
Ask champions to bring a short question record: who needs the answer, what decision it supports, which systems are involved, what a trusted answer would include, and what happens today. That record is the raw material for every later decision about scope and evaluation.
Keep sensitive originals in their approved systems and share abstracted descriptions in group sessions. "Which overdue accounts also have an open renewal?" is a perfectly useful workflow question without customer names, balances or relationship manager details pasted into a shared document. Champions who model that discipline teach it faster than any policy memo.
Give the network a route to resolution
A weekly clinic only works if named owners attend and can actually decide. Definition disputes go to the business metric owner. Access problems go to the source system administrator. Product defects go to the implementation team. Record the decision and the next action, not a transcript.
Champions must be able to tell a colleague what happened to their request. An issue register with owner, status and next review date beats a busy chat channel full of unanswered questions. Every demonstration example also needs a review date, because a question that worked before a reorganization may use the wrong region afterward. A champion who flags a failing example is helping the program, and leaders should say so publicly.
Measure the role by friction removed, then decide in a month
Do not rank champions by prompts or demonstrations. Those numbers reward activity, not value. Track how many recurring workflows have an agreed owner, how quickly blocked questions reach the right team, and whether approved examples keep working. Verify claimed time savings with the affected team, including the time spent checking answers.
A practical first month: agree the role and recruit around two workflows in week one, collect a dozen question records in week two, run a clinic with the implementation team in week three, and in week four ask participating managers whether the service helped. Then continue, rescope, or stop on that evidence. Keep the next month’s responsibilities tied to what participants found useful.