The Resonance Test 102: Creating Citizen Developers
Bringing agentic AI into an enterprise is complicated business. This new-to-the world process needs good models. Fortunately, we’ve found one: Eric Pace, Head of AI at Cox Communications, who created an interesting and effective citizen developer program at his organization. In this Resonance Test conversation with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer, he details what it took to get his people AI literate and then encourage them to adopt responsible practices and guidelines in their behavior.
It wasn’t enough to think of employees, Pace also had to consider company leaders. He reports there is “no instant gratification” involved here. “The notion that I can ask a very complex question and instantly get a very complex answer sets the perception that I can just go implement at scale enterprise-grade capabilities and get value out of them tomorrow.”
He says that’s not how things work, especially, “When you take into account the change management adoption and process curves that you've got to crawl through to see the value come to fruition.”
Pace says that for the first eight months of the journey, it felt like, “Hey, it’s coming, it's coming, it's coming,” and now his senior leadership team says that the projects his citizen developers launched “have the absolute potential to drive the value that we've prescribed as possible in the very near future.”
Listen, and learn how to drive that value in your organization.
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