How to embed AI in your company - Holiday Extras
At the recent AI Summit in London the team at Holiday Extras were awarded the AI implementor of the year award.
David Norris, their Chief Growth Officer supported by David Lee, Director of Innovation & Growth then presented their strategy, and as it builds on best practice for a change enablement program I think you’ll find it useful for your own roll-out.
Who are Holiday Extras?
Holiday Extras is a UK-based travel company with a team of 800. They provide airport parking, fast track security, car hire and insurance. As David described, “we sell everything apart from the holiday.”
At the start of this process David described they were AI virgins - embarking on this journey for the first time. They understood that to capitalise on the power of AI technology they needed their people to be empowered and enabled to use the new tools.
As David described, “co-pilots need great pilots”
He then walked through five core challenges they faced with embedding AI in their organisation and how they approached them.
Note: I wrote my notes to reflect what I heard, so I hope I have captured the essence of what was presented accurately.
The dinosaur problem “I’m too old”
This technology has arrived recently and continues to develop at a rapid pace.
It can seem disconcerting for anyone over a certain age and there is a temptation to leave it to others.
The Holiday Extras CEO Matthew Pack is passionate about AI and its ability to redefine the products and services they offer to their customers. He provides “permission from the top” for his own leadership team to embrace and learn how AI can impact every function.
The leadership team receive briefings from David and the AI ‘experts’ in the company to keep them up to date with what is going on in the world of AI, and AI features on the executive team’s weekly agenda.
AI is not a side project locked away in a dark cupboard - it is embedded in the company strategy.
The team follow the “see one, do one, teach one” learning model, where everyone in the leadership team is shown how to build a small AI agent or custom GPT, they then build one themselves, before then teaching someone else how to do it.
This demonstrates to all leaders what is possible and ensures that those closest to the business processes have a working understanding of how AI could impact their part of the organisation.
AI has an executive sponsor (David as Chief Growth Officer) and this means that AI has a seat at the board table. It ensures the company is spending money on AI learning and roll-outs.
David quoted a comment from a previous presentation from the incoming CTO at PwC UK “The ROI of AI investments is the right to compete in future.”
Don’t get hung up on trying to demonstrate immediate ROI from your tests or you’ll focus only on cost cutting use cases and not the truly valuable new customer value propositions and experiences.
The Skynet problem
In the Terminator series of movies, Skynet is the network of ‘machines’ that takes over the world and is often used as an example of the dangers of AI.
To counter this David and his team focus on making AI fun.
They ran expo days where colleagues could come and see different use cases of AI in action.
They had an AI avatar train on all of the senior leadership voices, which colleagues could then speak to and have say whatever they wanted.
This resulted in the most common request for each person’s senior leader to say “congratulations on your great work - have a pay rise!”
The safe play problem
The next challenge they faced was how to let their teams experiment with AI without causing damage to the company or the customer experience.
Firstly they created a safe playground using AI Clean Rooms with ChatGPT Enterprise that provided guardrails to their testing. You can read their case study with ChatGPT on the OpenAI website.
The team created an AI Steering Group, a Centre of Excellence that included roles from across the business.
I grabbed this slide that shows some of the included parties:
I love those three guiding principles on the right:
Lead…AI across the organisation
Create platform to spark innovation….
Prepare…for an AI-focused future
This is not a side project.
The Ignorance Problem “I don’t know where to start”
Even though leaders are on board, mobilising the wider team to start testing and learning with AI is a constant challenge - it doesn’t happen on its own.
David and his team drive constant 360 communication across the full employee base, with regular features on their internal HXTV channel.
They’ve organised “AI for Beginners” sessions, to ground every employee in every role in the basics of what AI is and how it functions - AI should not be left purely for the tech team to understand.
An AI Slack channel brings everyone together to discuss ideas.
AI conference days allow the entire company to engage in discussions about new use cases.
The team run hackathons where everyone can bring a business problem and collaborate with technical colleagues to bring an idea to life.
They run “prompting masterclasses” to help colleagues learn these new skills and understand how AI could be embedded into their core processes.
The Day Job Problem “I’m too busy”
With everything else that is going on in a busy company its common to hear “How can I fit this new stuff in as well?”
“You have to make time,” says David.
To support this they have created ten AI Business Partner roles (similar to an HR business partner).
The AI Business Partner acts as that link between the team and business processes back to the AI Steering Group - providing support, advice and answering questions.
They have also nominated AI Amplifiers, one in every team across the business - 38 of them. You can think of these as change champions or advocates - individuals in the team who have additional enablement and support to ensure someone with AI expertise and passion is embedded in every team.
AI is the strategy
Rounding out an entertaining and insightful presentation it was clear to see why this team had won the AI Implementor of the Year award.
AI was not a quirky project off to the side of the core business - it has been embedded into every aspect of the firm - from top leadership down to the summer intern, from front end customer processes, to internal efficiency.
Running a successful change program can be the difference between the success or failure of any technology shift, and Holiday Extras have shown how change needs to be embedded across every interaction in the company.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Enablement Assessment - Answer nine questions in five minutes and receive your free personalised report to help you SDRs and AEs generate pipeline.
Revenue 360 Assessments - inspire and lead your revenue teams with revenue specific 360 reports designed for marketing, sales and customer success teams.
Buyer Enablement Platform - We’ll design, build and manage your buyer enablement platform on your behalf - generating quality pipeline in under 90 days.