From the outside it looked like a cult… and maybe at the start, it was a little.
It was 2024. AI had shown itself to be disruptive, and I wanted to build an AI culture inside IdeaTech straight away. But right out of the gate, I made the classic mistake. I thought it would be useful to explain what I’d discovered — to explain AI. Under a “trendy” name (Lunch with AI): meetings, slides, demos. Me at the front, everyone else listening. The little professor.
Result: polite attention. Zero contagion.
So I stopped looking for people I needed to convince and started looking for people who didn’t need convincing. Not the most senior. Not the most experienced. Just the ones already exploring: outside working hours, with tools that weren’t yet delivering any measurable return — purely to understand. The ones whose eyes lit up when it came up in conversation.
We got together.
Since then, we meet every month — and still do today. No agenda. Everyone brings what they’ve found, what they’ve tried, what didn’t work, and what fascinated them most. Between sessions: experimenting, breaking things, adapting. Like a funnel: noise goes in, principles come out.
The group grows slowly. People join by showing passion before competence.
It doesn’t produce scale effects in a quarter. It has no clean metric to put in a report.
Or rather: it does have a metric. Just not the one you’d expect.
The most important KPI is the converts from the opposition. The ones who were firmly against AI. Who at some point sit down, try it, and become the most convinced supporters.
Not because we convinced them. Because they found their own reason.
When that happens, I know the culture is real.