At this point in 2024, if you work in the corporate world and aren’t being bombarded left and right by news stories and social media pontifications and business imperatives around Generative AI (GenAI), you must be living under a very comfortable rock. It’s difficult to find an earnings update, pitch deck, or business strategy that doesn’t at least make cursory mention of the disruptive technology. But while it is important to take a strategic, top-down approach to enterprise transformation, my experience talking to clients and consulting leaders over the past few months is that bottom-up adoption of GenAI is equally a priority. Leaders want to know how to roll out pilots and scaled deployments, how to shift cultures to value agility and experimentation, and how to upskill employees across levels and functions. And while I would still recommend a traditional persona-based change management strategy replete with guiding principles and governance models, GenAI also warrants a different kind of change management: play.

Deloitte’s State of Generative AI in the Enterprise Q1 report surveyed more than 2500 business leaders and found that they were overwhelmingly excited and fascinated by GenAI (62% and 46% of respondents, respectively). Meanwhile, 91% of respondents plan to use GenAI to improve efficiency or productivity and 72% of respondents expect to make changes to their talent strategy in the next 2 years, but only 23% of respondents felt that their talent was prepared or very highly prepared for the technology. These findings suggest workforces need to get up to speed ASAP, but also that a meaningful well of positive sentiment exists. Even those who are feeling more uncertain and anxious than excited benefit a lot from co-creation:

Taking this into consideration, Deloitte’s 2024 Human Capital Trends report introduces the concept of the Digital Playground, which is “not a singular place or virtual platform. Rather, it’s a mindset and an approach in which technologies are curated with intention and opportunities to use them are democratized.” It’s a “safe space” that allows for experimentation with limited data, legal, or reputational risk. Rather than exclusively relying on formal learning paths, opening up opportunities for dedicated employees to use new tools can bolster their experience along with business outcomes.

What does enterprise play really look like?

In November 2023, I was grappling with the tension between “showing” and “telling” our own leaders and practitioners about GenAI. While it was clear the core team needed to be centralized and strategic when piloting novel technologies and developing external points of view, there was overwhelming curiosity and interest from the broader practice to get involved.

I am fortunate to hold roles at Deloitte focused on sensing and capability building at the intersection of AI; the Technology, Media, and Telecom (TMT) industry; and Human Capital (HC). In this unique Venn diagram, I teamed with a group of motivated leaders to run an inaugural “GenAI Promptathon”.

You’ve likely heard of a hackathon, where people form teams to build technical solutions to wicked problems. But our Human Capital consulting practice is largely nontechnical, and our expectation is not that practitioners will need to become developers overnight, but rather that they will need to build prompt engineering skills to effectively manage and interact with GenAI. So, rather than building apps or agents from scratch, participants would spend 3 weeks using our in-house multimodal generative AI tool to create use cases catered to our TMT clients. Thus, the Promptathon was born.

How did we do it?

1)      Secured buy-in from industry and AI leaders and developed a set of judging criteria, including:

a.       Business Need: Has the team identified a cutting-edge problem statement or question? Is it relevant for HC TMT clients?

b.       GenAI Mastery: Did the team effectively harness the capabilities of the tool? Were the selected datasets relevant and substantial?

c.       Business Impact: Is the benefit to our clients clear and valuable? Would the solution meaningfully increase cost efficiency? Would it significantly streamline processes?

d.       Pitch Excellence: Was the team articulate in presenting the solution? Did they compellingly convey their story and the solution’s impact?

2)      Worked with the tool team to build a custom environment with relevant datasets, such as 10Ks, job postings, labor market trends, dummy interview outputs, and dummy compensation data

3)      Shared an application with the entire HC TMT community of 500+ and selected over 30 participants across levels, offerings, and geographies. The entire process was virtual, but we set up a chat and weekly office hours with technology SMEs for troubleshooting and staying connected

4)      Ran a kick-off call to introduce the judges, judging criteria, GenAI, and tool, and then let the teams loose to create their solutions!

What was the Promptathon’s impact?

When we launched this experiment, I figured it would be a cool way to introduce motivated practitioners to new tools and maybe stumble upon a couple of good business ideas. At the least, we’d have feedback for the tool team. I couldn’t have anticipated how incredibly well the Promptathon would go, and how much other leaders across Deloitte would be inspired to run their own programs based on this model. Maybe your own team could be next!

The Promptathon resulted in five key benefits:

1)      A diverse set of employees became early adopters of a relatively robust, complex Deloitte tool, which accelerated adoption and provided salient feedback to the tool team

2)      Leaders and practitioners learned about GenAI within the context of business problems—the judging criteria emphasized not only the ability to ideate use cases and use GenAI tools, but also the ability to size the problem and client impact

3)      Participants had to build important soft skills, too, such as the ability to make a business pitch—there was a bit of art in how well they could convey their idea, whether through our required one-pager submission or the optional pitch video

4)      We created an organic talent pool of practitioners across the practice interested in becoming involved in both internal and external Generative AI initiatives

5)      We had a ton of fun…for free!

Ultimately, this experience confirmed my own bias toward holding two truths at once—it is possible to run a centralized, strategic transformation program while also providing scrappy, fun, and meaningful opportunities for employees to learn and co-create along the way. Who says play is only for kids?

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Daniela (Dany) Rifkin | Senior Consultant, Deloitte Consulting LLP