What we’ve learned (so far) by using AI in coaching
In this episode of the Fearless Thinkers podcast, Fredrik Schuller, Head of BTS Coach and Executive Vice President, shares how artificial intelligence can augment the leadership coaching process by increasing consistency, accessibility, and scalability.
Most of us want to lead in a way that matters; to lift others up and build something people want to be part of.But too often, we’re socialized (explicitly or not) to lead a certain way: play it safe, stick to what’s proven, and avoid the questions that really need asking.
This podcast is about the people and ideas changing that story. We call them fearless thinkers.
Our guests are boundary-pushers, system challengers, and curious minds who look at today’s challenges and ask, “What if there is a better way?”If that’s the energy you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.
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Masami Cookson: Welcome to Fearless Thinkers, the BTS podcast. My name is Masami Cookson and our host is Rick Cheatham, head of marketing at BTS. On today's show, Rick has a conversation with Fredrik Schuller, who is head of BTS's coaching area of expertise. After 15 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, Fredrik returned home to Norway three years ago to better serve clients across Northern Europe. Fredrik's experience working with leaders at some of Silicon Valley's fastest-growing tech companies and the world's largest energy organizations has kept him on the cutting edge of building client results through people development. Hey, Rick.
Rick Cheatham: Hey Masami! What's been, gosh, coming across everyone's feeds wherever they look right now is what's going on with AI and what's going on with the different free tools out there that can just radically change what work looks like. I was looking at this crazy one where this guy loaded every Adele song and told it to write, and the thing was amazing. It's just kind of mind-blowing what technology's doing now.
Masami: I'm a huge Adele fan, so if it results in more music from her, I'm here for it.
Rick: Well, the terrible thing is it's maybe not more music from her, it's music from some random computer that's been programmed to sound like her, but still, it's good.
Masami: Woof.
Rick: With Fredrik today, we get deep into the power of coaching. AI can bridge the gap between those coaching sessions. It's a great chat.
Masami: Cool. Let's get into it.
Rick: Hey, Fredrik, welcome to the show.
Fredrik: Hey, thanks.
Rick: How you been, man?
Fredrik: Yeah, life is good. It's been a wonderful winter in Norway, so we have got lots of skiing and fun stuff going on here.
Rick: Oh, I'm jealous.
Fredrik: I made myself an initiative. I'm mid-40s now, and I got kids that are five and seven, and I decided I want to be the dad that learns really difficult stuff when he's getting older to be a good role model for them. So, I've been trying to take up something called wing foiling to learn to surf the wind on a hydrofoil, and it is so difficult and it's so rewarding. I just wear thick wetsuits and do it. So that's what's been in my blood boiling lately.
Rick: It sounds very intense. It sounds well above my capabilities. Like you, I do enjoy so much continuing to push myself mentally, physically. I think I've got almost 10 years on you but at the same time, I always kind of live in fear of stopping the new things and what life becomes like when it's just a series of pattern days.
Fredrik: So actually, Rick, this is something I learned through my own coaching experience: to find these new outlets. When I first got introduced to coaching was when I got promoted to my biggest role in my career and had a kid at the same time. It was in San Francisco and Jessica, who's now our CEO, she told me I would have responsibility for the West Coast, and I was just having Oscar at the same time. And that was really difficult. It went downhill for about a year until I asked for help. And when I did ask for help, I got a coach and it was truly transformative for my life and how my relations with others, how I thought about the world, how I was able to find a balance in life, but also have really high impact and performance on the job. So that's what led me into coaching in the first place. And also what sparked a lot of the ideas for what we'll talk about more today.
Rick: I remember that moment for you, my friend— transitioning from zero kids to one. As a father of four, I still would argue that that's the toughest transition. And, actually, I didn't know until we were preparing for this that it was actually your coach that really helped you pivot from being stressed out and constantly running from thing to thing to being able to be a better leader. And it sounds like a better father. So that's awesome.
Fredrik: Yeah, the thing about coaching that's so unique to me is it's not just helping me. It has this Multiplier effect. So, my days were better, I had better interactions with people, five to 10 to 15 people around me every day had a better life experience because of it.
Rick: Wow, that's an awesome way to think about it. We don't often think about the broader net that is cast when somebody is performing better and managing their stress better and able to prioritize their day better. If you wouldn't mind giving us a little bit more perspective on what great coaching looks like.
Fredrik: That's a big question, Rick because we can spend the next hour on this topic itself. But if you think about kind of the history of coaching, it used to be available to only executives at really high prices, 20 to $30,000. And it would be only the people at the top of the house also very much based on the processes that that coach felt comfortable with. Our point of view is that how can we make this incredible way of learning, an incredible way of developing available to the thousands and the many and not just a few?So, we worked on finding ways to make it vastly more affordable and vastly more scalable. We did research on 150,000 coaching conversations to figure out what is it that's coming up, what are the most common issues that are coming up during coaching journeys? And what we found was that there were a series of mindsets that came up over and over and over again. And one of the problem areas that we also had initially when we were scaling was that a coach in Asia might have done a different approach than a coach in Europe. So, when we were trying to create consistent quality around the globe, we started creating our own coaching methodologies. If we can change someone's mindset and reveal underlying mindsets around different approaches, we can shift behavior much faster.
Rick: You said something quickly: “Hey, these are the mindsets.” To me, that's a very important word that often means different things to different people. Are you talking about just limiting beliefs potentially? Are you talking about just perspective on ways of working, both, something altogether different?
Fredrik: Oh, man. You're asking me to define mindset?Rick: That's what just happened.
Fredrik: That's what just happened. Well, in the simplest sense, our mindsets are the beliefs that we hold around the world that forms the way that we behave. So those can be around work, those can come from our childhood, those can come from recent interactions… Or it can come from experience from all walks of life. And the way that we view the world and the way that our mindsets drives behavior, sometimes that's productive and sometimes that's limiting.Rick: Cool, yeah, I've spent most of my career coaching salespeople when it comes to how, and when I've coached, and I've always said, salespeople have to be true believers or they're evil. Meaning that if I can convince you to separate yourself from your money for something that you don't necessarily believe in, that's evil. But the best sellers are the ones that tend to believe that what they're out there doing is what's best for themselves, their company and of course, their customer. And so I've definitely seen the power of mindsets either really accelerating business outcomes or really holding them back.Fredrik: You also have other examples of that. Many leaders that take on a leadership role for the first time may have a mindset that they need to have all the answers, and they need to figure it all out instead of having a mindset that that's what the team is for and we're gonna figure this out together.
Rick: Oh, it makes all the sense in the world, for sure. Well, so let's skip to the second half of what you said, which was scalability and how you and your team were beginning to use technology to scale coaching even more or make the coaching interactions for the existing populations even better.
Fredrik: Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And my journey into this started when I took over the role as heading coach within BTS and I decided to do a new coaching journey to experience what the current customer experience would be. Throughout the six months I was doing it, I kept mapping how I was feeling about the journey, highs, lows, emotions, needs, wants at any stage. I had bad experiences, I had great experiences, I had mediocre experiences throughout the time. But the first thing I noticed was that it was up and down and it was a very predictive pattern. Every time that I had a meeting with my coach, it was absolutely fantastic. And then it just started dipping. And very often in the coaching conversations, we were talking about a specific interaction or a collaboration I was having with someone but I felt like so alone in between. I wanted more support from my coach. And I realized that a coach that coaches many people can't know about everything that I got going and even though we might have talked about this interaction, she couldn't be there or send me notes right before every time.So when I shared this with the team and we started looking at like, what's going on here? We realized that kind of a man-machine relationship might become really, really helpful in this situation. So that's where we came up with kind of an augmentation of AI to help the coaching between the coaching sessions, because there's some things that are really sacred about the human-to-human relationship that you get as a coach, but there's many other practices that you can be helped by an AI in between the sessions.So let me give you an example. Like one of the things that 80% of our coaching journeys touch upon is being at my best, being resilient and being resourceful, more resourceful in how I operate. And the big mindset shift is for people to go from, “Triggers happen, and I need to get rid of the triggers that upset me and triggers my amygdala,” to being, “Well, triggers will happen every day, but I'm in control of my emotions. And we have a process to help you get out of a triggered moment and start using the prefrontal cortex and be at high-quality thinking.”Usually, people would experience that in the coaching session with a coach. That process is called ETC, it's about the emotion, the truth and the choices that you have in that situation. And it's really helpful and you have a big “Aha!” and like, “Oh my God, I had no idea that I could help myself become more resourceful in these situations.” But it's really difficult to do, and it's maybe three or four weeks till the next coaching session.We've figured out how to then give you a bot that can help you through that process every single day or every single time you're triggered so that you can self-monitor and self-help yourself over time, which is the ultimate goal of coaching. You shouldn't become addicted to your coach. The coach should help you to become more self-reliant over time.
Rick: If I have a boss that's a great coach, being able to self-manage, I would assume, is always the very, very best outcome.
Fredrik: I agree. And then what's interesting is we've been testing this further too is that initial intention of this AI was to be able to help you in between coaching sessions. But what we start to realize is that it might have different applications too.For example, we do pods and workshops to also teach people how to become better at managing their state and being resilient and being at their best. And traditionally now, we've either tried to get people to get it through demonstration or for them to practice with someone else who doesn't know how to do it. So, we've been experimenting with using the bot to give people an experience with having that process for the first time. And what we're seeing too is people are more honest and open up way more with a bot than they would do with a coworker, for example.
Rick: Wow, I actually never, never thought of that, but I think we as humans in general can't help but try to manage our persona. So that is a surprising bit of information, but actually when I think about it, quite intuitive.Fredrik: When you think about learning coaching therapy, like any sort of help that you have, it's usually at a pre-scheduled time, but when you're having your issues, they happen anytime during the day. They can happen at 8 AM, they can happen at lunch, they can happen at night.Rick: Yeah, of course it does. Of course it does. What else is on the horizon when it comes to AI and coaching?
Fredrik: A different way of doing, getting multi-rater, a 360 feedback? I mean, we've all experienced getting a traditional 360 model, where you get rated across 50 behaviors from the people around you. And I would call it moderately helpful but when I've debriefed them in the past with a coach, it's been frustrating because you see, “Hey, I'm lower on this one dimension” — let's say strategic thinking. Then it starts becoming like a guessing game. What's the situations? When did this happen? You don't really know because there's very little written or deeper feedback around it other than you're scoring lower on this one single item. So I want to kind of get around that.When I had my coaching experience I shared earlier, I got a verbal 360, which was amazing. My coach interviewed about 10 to 15 people around me. And it was incredible. I laughed, I cried, I was ashamed, I was proud, all the emotions when I saw it. And it became very clear the things I could do to have a better impact on the people around me. And that cost $10,000. So it's not scalable, but what we've figured out with our NLP and AI is how to actually do that with a bot instead. So we're, again, trying to take something that was available at a really high end and making it available to the many and try to help the person providing the feedback to give more useful feedback throughout the process.
Rick: We recently had Peter Mulford [on the podcast] talking about AI in general, but to hear very, very specifically how it can make a difference in everyday life, how it can take something that most people would say is good and important but also make it possibly more accurate based on that thing we were talking about before where people aren't as guarded when speaking to a bot as they would be speaking to another human and more available. I mean, I think the more people that get the right coaching to perform better, the better.
Fredrik: Yeah, and there's a couple of things here that we're doing that I think also can make a big difference in longer term. The first thing is, anytime that I've received an assessment, I'm not in a good place before I'm about to open that file. My stomach is clenching. I'm nervous about what people are gonna say about me. It does not come with a lot of great emotions.So one of the other things we're experimenting with is actually to create a cheerleading squad for you practically before you open it. So all the raters are actually encouraged to do an encouraging video to say, “Hey, Rick, love working with you and I've given you some feedback that can make us even better together, and I'll be here all the way helping you.” So you get to see all these videos of encouragement of the people that have rated you prior to opening the report. So you're getting to an emotional state where you're feeling supported rather than judged because I think the whole feeling of being judged is not like a great part of assessments.
Rick: I would probably take some of those videos and convert them to ring tones just for the hard days.
Fredrik: And then the other thing that I think when you're looking at someone's behavior, it's rarely an isolated issue. It's usually a collision between multiple people. Yet when we do multi-rater assessments and start coaching journeys, for example, you put the assessor clearly in the judge seat. We're working now on finding a way to switch it throughout the assessment to ask the question if they're willing to reflect on their role in this behavior and go deeper and say, “Hey, might I actually have some part in Rick behaving this way or you behaving in this way?” And why that's interesting to do is that if you can get two people to work on an improvement together versus one that you're much more likely to make an improvement on that.And the way that we came to this insight was there was someone on my team that I was very frustrated with not stepping into the forward-looking strategic role of the product management that he was doing. And I gave the person feedback and he got quite upset with the feedback. And it was hard. We went through this a reflection process together on like how can we help change this. And at some point in time, he said, "You know, Fredrik, there's no space for me to do what you're asking me to do because when you see me not doing it, you jump in and you do it every single time and there's no space and you do it so fast. There's no vacuum for me to step into." So how can we bring that into the way that we get feedback from those people around us and into the rating so that we can switch the rater from being a judge but also be a reflector on their own role on enabling or making it difficult to do the new behaviors that you want from others around you.
Rick: I can see how that would potentially shift completely the conversation, how we address the things that are gaps and potentially accelerate the positive outcomes.
Fredrik: Absolutely. So I'm really excited to be testing these things over the next six months. Every time we try something, we just learned so much new what's working and what's not working, and how we need to pivot and what needs to change.
Rick: Love it. Well, hey, my friend, thank you for giving us so much time today. I could talk about this stuff forever.
Fredrik: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Masami: If you'd like to stay up to date on the latest from the Fearless Thinkers Podcast, please subscribe. Links to all of the relevant content discussed in today's podcast are in the show notes or you can always reach us at bts.com. Thanks again.
Related Content
In Part 1, I told you about the three decisions we made two years ago and the simulation flywheel that produced our first Applied AI diamond.
Here’s the field-notes version.
Over 80% of our global business have now adopted a new Applied AI approach for doing simulations in the first eight weeks, across 24 countries and every practice.
The flywheel didn’t stop with simulations. It moved into finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Teams started building agents and bringing them onto their own org charts. We didn’t plan for any of that. We built the conditions for people to find their own breakthroughs.
What it felt like inside the flywheel.
When the simulation team went live with their first clients on the new way of working, the lead person hit a wall. Their words:
“You’re asking too much. You’re making me be a full-stack developer. Up until this point I did a small part, and I sent it to the team, and they built off the back end, and they brought it back. And now I have to end-to-end soup to nuts, basically alone.”
There was graphic UI work nobody had been trained for, the fear of delivering quality below what BTS expects of itself, and the weight of not having a playbook. This was not the joyful adoption story most consultancies tell.
Then something shifted. Six members showed up for product testing, where the usual was two or three. The work created teamwork I hadn’t seen at BTS in years. The breakthrough was not an instantaneous change from skepticism to celebration. It was a breakdown in confidence, then rally, then bonding. If we didn’t make room for the breakdown, we would have lost the rally.
The other breakthrough was global teamwork; not yet a BTS core strength. Our culture is beautiful: high-freedom and entrepreneurial. But people’s first identities are to their countries. Almost every prior attempt we’ve made at a global initiative has failed. The one exception was Covid. So, when I say what happened next surprised me, I mean it.
I asked to join the simulation team’s Slack channel rather than pulling them into status meetings. What I got to watch in the mornings was someone in South Africa waking up, posting “I tried this and got stuck,” then London adding on, then San Francisco weighing in, then a surprise breakthrough overnight from Tokyo. We didn’t engineer that. Curious and determined BTS’ers did. The problem was interesting enough that the org chart didn’t matter. It was amazing to see and a glimpse into the next evolution of the BTS culture.
The pattern: Explore, expand, institutionalize, renew.
What we’ve now seen play out, both inside BTS and with clients, follows the same four-step pattern. Each step asks a specific decision of the leader.
Explore.
Stay stubborn on the aspiration and fluid on the path. Our breakthrough wasn’t the path we originally took. We changed tools and approaches. Nobody could have foreseen that. And if the team had taken the first six months of learnings from AI as their definitive “this is the detailed path we will follow,” we never would have gotten the disruption. Five different tool combinations were tried before we found the one that worked. Companies that lock into a single path or tool too early are betting against compounding capability that doubles roughly every seven months. That is not a bet I’d take.
Expand.
Run the old way and the new way side by side. When the simulation team’s breakthroughs got real, the instinct was to retreat into more internal testing. We did the opposite. They ran old way and new way in parallel on 6 or 8 live client projects across all three geographies. Every single one ended up going live the new way. The backup was always there. They didn’t need it.
Institutionalize.
Burn the boats. The simulation team committed that no new client work would be done the old way after January 1. The other practice leads then committed to dates within Q1, even though most of them had not yet experienced the new way themselves. They had to trust their colleagues. If you can do it for the most complex thing, you could probably do it for the less complex ones. By February 15, we had approaching 90% global adoption across 24 countries, across all practices. I was shocked and proud. We had spent years failing at exactly this kind of global rollout.
Renew.
Treat your agents as contractors. People on our diamond teams are now managing 30+ agents they built themselves. Our teams give agents performance feedback. We terminate their contracts when they don’t deliver. We expand the responsibility of agents when they outperform. The frontier question we’re wrestling with now is token budgeting. Two friends of mine running engineering-heavy companies believe that within 6 - 9 months, their token cost per engineer will exceed the cost of the engineer. Whether that’s the right framing is open. The question is real, and every CEO will be asked some version of it within the year.
What had to be true for this to scale.
Once we achieved this amazing global innovation, the leadership sat down to figure out what made it work. We named five things. None of them were about the technology.
Real pain points as the starting point. We had so many people frustrated from those ways of working, all the back and forth and all the wasted time, that this was gold for them. The old way was already painful. The new way wasn’t a forced disruption; it was relief. Find the workflow where the pain is loudest and start there.
The diamond unlocked creativity, it didn’t constrain it. This was the most differentiated insight, and the one most leaders miss. It wasn't "here's the new tasks and rules." It was, "once you learn how to do this, the sky's the limit. You can be even more creative." If your rollout feels like a new set of rules constraining your people, you’ve built the wrong thing.
Pair deep expertise with fresh eyes. The disproportionate share of our breakthroughs came from a tenured tinkerer with total command of the work, paired with someone new to the role who hadn’t yet built the muscle memory of how it had always been done. Without that pairing, you get incremental improvements to the work you already know how to do, instead of a reinvention.
Refuse the “people are too busy” reflex. When I brought the rollout to the global leadership team, the excuses came fast. “Our people are too busy. They’re burnt out. Q1 is going to be busy. No one’s going to have time.” My response: “This is a chance to eliminate the tasks you dread and expand what you love. I know it is a short push of extra work, and I think after the fact you and your team will feel joy and pride and say it was the best time we ever spent.” This is the moment most AI rollouts die.
Senior leaders must lead by example and do the work themselves. This is not middle manager’s job. This is not something you delegate. Even though you don’t build simulations anymore, you must know what this is. One of our partners proactively put time on senior leaders’ calendars and forced them to do the work. Once they started building, the excitement grew, and they could advocate for the rollout because they understood it. If your executives haven’t put their hands on the keyboard, you don’t have a rollout. You have a memo.
What we’re seeing across clients.
We’re now running this play with client organizations across industries and geographies. The companies whose flywheels are accelerating paired their A-players with their early-career talent, pulled IT and legal into the working sessions, refused the “too busy” reflex, and put their senior leaders’ hands on the keyboard. The companies whose flywheels are stuck almost always have a leadership pattern at the center of the stall. Not a tooling pattern. Not a governance pattern. A leadership pattern.
If this resonates, let’s talk.
If you read Part 1 and asked yourself whether your flywheel was turning, the question I’d add now is sharper: do you have the conditions in place for a diamond to appear? If yes, you’re already moving. If no, the technology will not save you.
Here's where we're starting with clients: a working session, half day to a full day, with a small group that owns one of your highest-friction processes. Together we map where your first diamond is most likely to land, how to set up the side-by-side trial, and what your version of "burn the boats" should look like.
The destination, if we do this right, is a self-reliant culture of applied AI inside your company. 5, 10, 15 diamonds compounding into a fundamentally different way of operating. From what I have experienced this is a once in a career opportunity for dramatic shareholder value creation if you get that muscle going. I say that because I'm watching it happen, in real time, inside our own company and across our client base.
If you want to get your flywheels spinning and map your first diamond, start here. Bring your hardest workflow. We'll bring the playbook.
Three decisions that changed everything.
Two years ago, we made three deliberate decisions about how BTS would move with Applied AI.
We would become our own Customer Zero.
While others were building strategies, defining governance, and waiting for clarity, we made a different call: we decided not to wait. Not because the stakes were low, but because they were high. And because in a space evolving this quickly, clarity wouldn’t come from planning. It would come from movement.
So instead of starting with a roadmap, we started with three principles:
- No top-down mandate. The people closest to the work figure it out.
- IT must evolve from gatekeeper to enabler - leading AI trials and fast experimentation.
- Don’t wait for certainty.
We set the organization in motion, and once we did, things started to move quickly.
What if we started this company today?
Waiting for certainty is itself a choice, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.
We started where we knew the work best: our simulations. No perfect plan, just teams moving, trying, and iterating.
Simulations are core to who we are at BTS. Companies that simulate don’t just make better decisions; they execute faster and build more engaged cultures.
The team asked a simple question:
"What if we were to start our company today?”
That question started the flywheel.
They asked IT for a few licenses and started building - vibe-coding, writing agents, and testing tools - moving at a pace that would make any VC-backed start-up smile.
The messy middle.
At first, the team was underwhelmed.
The early reports were blunt:
“Not good with math.”
“Poor graph capabilities.”
The team wasn't discouraged. They kept tinkering - jumping between tools, staying on top of new releases, experimenting constantly.
This was a small team, across 24 countries, building off each other’s ideas. Laughing at crazy creations. Breaking things. Iterating in a sandbox alongside real clientwork.
Each cycle produced something:
- A sharper scenario
- A faster build
- A more powerful simulation
The flywheel was turning, and it was generating something real.
When the diamond appeared.
Then something shifted.
The team moved into client trials across five countries. They figured out ISO compliance and built the architecture to handle the complexity, the “spaghetti.”
And what emerged wasn’t incremental:
- What used to take weeks started happening in days.
- Limited creativity started to feel like unlimited innovation.
- Clients became self-serving.
- Agentic simulations were built directly into client systems for real-time updates and preparation.
This was our first AI diamond - a high-impact outcome created by many cycles of experimentation compounding into real value.
It only appeared because we kept the flywheel turning, each cycle increasing the odds that something would break through.
95% adoption in eight weeks.
Then it was time to take the AI diamond global.
BTS is decentralized and highly entrepreneurial. We operate across 24 countries and 38 offices, where local teams have real autonomy.
And historically? That’s meant a low appetite for adopting something built somewhere else and pushed from the center.
So we expected resistance.
Instead, something surprising happened.
In the first eight weeks, we saw 95% adoption across our global footprint.
It felt completely different from our own digital initiatives, ERP implementations, top-down rollouts of the past.
This moved on its own. Why?
We realized it didn’t start with a framework or a model, it started with a feeling.
The feeling of being at the leading edge of one’s craft and profession.
- Joy
- Excitement
- Pride
As we watched this play out across teams it stopped feeling like isolated wins.
There was a pattern to it. A repeatable, organic, innovation motion.
And the flywheel didn’t stop with simulations.
It spread across finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Some cycles led to small improvements, and others revealed new diamonds.
Not becausewe planned for them, but because we built the conditions for people to find them.
The question I'd ask any CEO right now: Is your flywheel turning, or are you still waiting for the perfect plan?
In part 2, I’ll share the key success factors behind the breakthrough, and what we’re now seeing across more than 120 global clients.
1. La Conversación Ha Cambiado
Durante los últimos dos años, el debate sobre la Inteligencia Artificial ha estado impulsado principalmente por proveedores tecnológicos y firmas de consultoría que animaban a las compañías a acelerar su adopción.
Hoy la conversación es distinta. Son los mercados financieros y los analistas quienes formulan la pregunta clave:
¿Dónde está el retorno?
Los datos muestran que los mercados apenas han incorporado expectativas de mejora de beneficios impulsados por IA en la mayoría de las compañías no tecnológicas. Mientras unas pocas grandes tecnológicas concentran las expectativas, el resto del mercado permanece bajo presión para demostrar impacto real en resultados.
Esto ya no va de ‘hype’ ni de titulares. Va de crear valor real, medible y sostenible.
Y el diagnóstico es claro: el reto no es la tecnología, sino la adopción organizativa.
Ahí es donde está la verdadera oportunidad.
2. Las organizaciones están chocando contra un muro — y lo saben
Tras dos años de programas amplios de IA: licencias masivas, sesiones de “IA para todos”, campañas de concienciación; muchas organizaciones se hacen la misma pregunta incómoda:
¿Y ahora qué?”
Se han lanzado iniciativas. Se han hecho pilotos. Pero el salto hacia un impacto escalable y medible no termina de llegar.
Los equipos utilizan herramientas de IA para ahorrar minutos. Algunos pilotos permanecen en fase de prueba durante meses, incluso años, sin escalar. Y la transición desde la “concienciación en IA” hacia la “IA que genera resultados de negocio” se convierte en un terreno para el que pocas organizaciones estaban realmente preparadas.
El desafío no es empezar. Es escalar.
3. Por Qué Existe Escepticismo: La Realidad Operativa
Cuando analizamos lo que ocurre en la práctica, la realidad operativa ayuda a entender el escepticismo del mercado. En distintos sectores se repiten los mismos patrones:
- Muchas iniciativas de IA se quedan atascadas en el piloto y nunca escalan.
- Un porcentaje importante no consigue generar impacto medible.
- Se produce una “curva J” de productividad: una fase inicial de disrupción antes de que aparezcan los beneficios.
- La “Shadow AI”, empleados utilizando herramientas personales sin gobernanza, se está convirtiendo en la norma, con los riesgos asociados.
El factor limitante no es el acceso a modelos o herramientas.
Es la capacidad y adopción organizativa: procesos, roles, gobernanza, habilidades y disciplina en la generación de valor.
4. Qué Hacen Diferente Las Organizaciones Que Sí Están Escalando La IA Con Éxito
Las compañías que están consiguiendo escalar la IA no necesariamente tienen más presupuesto ni más talento técnico. Lo que tienen es mayor disciplina organizativa.
Hay tres elementos marcan la diferencia:
- Desarrollan capacidades para cambiar comportamientos reales.
No se limitan a solo concienciar. No basta con webinars genéricos de “IA para todos”. Construyen capacidades estructuradas y basadas en roles:
- Directivos capaces de gobernar la estrategia de IA.
- Managers que saben rediseñar procesos y formas de trabajo.
- ‘Power users’ que lideran la identificación y el desarrollo de casos de uso.
- Y perfiles técnicos que llevan esos casos desde la idea hasta producción.
- Construyen cultura de datos, no solo infraestructura.
Los pipelines limpios importan. Pero también importa que exista una comprensión y entendimiento compartido sobre calidad del dato, gobernanza y uso responsable de la IA.
Sin ambas dimensiones, las iniciativas alcanzan rápidamente un techo: técnicamente viables, pero organizativamente bloqueadas.
- Gestionan la IA como una cartera de inversión, no como una lista de proyectos.
Cada iniciativa tiene un caso de negocio.
Los casos de uso se cualifican antes de asignar recursos.
El ROI se mide.
No persiguen cada tendencia. Priorizan con rigor —y detienen lo que no funciona.
Estos patrones no son teóricos ni aspiracionales. Son observables. Y replicables.
5. El Modelo de IA de Netmind: De la Adopción al Impacto a Escala
En Netmind hemos diseñado un enfoque precisamente para cerrar esta brecha entre intención y escala.
Nuestro modelo de IA es un marco integrado para ayudar a las organizaciones a transformar el potencial de la IA en resultados medibles, trabajando de forma coordinada en tres dimensiones interdependientes:
Pilar 1 — Valor De Negocio: Hacer Que Cada Iniciativa Justifique Su Inversión
La IA sin un caso de negocio claro es solo experimentación.
Trabajamos con equipos de liderazgo para establecer una disciplina sólida de generación de valor:
- Identificación de casos de uso de mayor impacto.
- Construcción rigurosa de business cases.
- Definición de métricas y marcos de medición.
- Diseño de estructuras de gobernanza que diferencian programas estratégicos de colecciones de pilotos desconectados.
La pregunta no es “¿qué puede hacer la IA?”, sino:
“¿Qué debería hacer para nosotros y cómo sabremos que está funcionando?”
Pilar 2 — Personas Y Organización: Construir Capacidades Que Perduren
La razón más habitual por la que la IA no escala no es técnica. Es humana.
Los equipos no saben cómo trabajar de forma diferente.
Los managers no saben cómo liderar en entornos híbridos humano-IA.
Los directivos no cuentan con marcos claros para decidir dónde invertir.
Nuestra arquitectura de desarrollo de capacidades cubre toda la organización en tres niveles:
- L100 — AI Fluency: Concienciación amplia: qué es la IA, qué puede y qué no puede hacer, y cómo impacta en cada rol. Es la base. Sin ella, el cambio no se consolida.
- L200 — AI Application: Capacitación práctica basada en roles para managers y responsables de negocio: identificación de casos de uso, rediseño de procesos y liderazgo de la adopción.
- L300 — AI Specialization: Itinerarios avanzados para ‘power users’, ‘champions’ internos y perfiles técnicos que llevan los casos desde concepto hasta producción y consolidan la capacidad a largo plazo.
Un principio clave de nuestro enfoque:
autosuficiencia por encima de dependencia.
No diseñamos programas que requieran soporte externo permanente. Construimos la capacidad interna para que las organizaciones puedan operar, adaptar y escalar por sí mismas.
Pilar 3 — Tecnología Y Datos: La Base Que Permite Avanzar Con Velocidad Y Seguridad
La estrategia y las capacidades necesitan una infraestructura adecuada.
Acompañamos a las organizaciones en el desarrollo de:
- Marcos de gobernanza del dato.
- Estándares de calidad.
- Guardrails de IA responsable
permitiéndolas avanzar de forma rápida y con seguridad, sin introducir nuevos riesgos.
No actuamos como integradores tecnológicos.
Trabajamos desde la perspectiva de negocio y organización, asegurando que las inversiones tecnológicas estén respaldadas por los procesos y capacidades necesarias para generar impacto real.
6. Cómo Trabajamos: Co-Crear En Lugar De Entregar
El modelo tradicional de consultoría en IA sigue siendo, en muchos casos, un modelo de entrega: se construye algo, se transfiere y el proyecto se da por cerrado.
La realidad de lo que suele pasar después es conocida: el traspaso falla, el equipo interno no puede sostenerlo y el piloto no escala.
En Netmind no construimos para las organizaciones. Construimos con ellas. Y desarrollamos sus capacidades para que puedan seguir construyendo sin nosotros.
Cada proyecto se diseña en torno a la co-creación. Nuestros expertos trabajan junto a los equipos internos. La metodología, las herramientas y los marcos de gobernanza se transfieren en tiempo real.
Eso es lo que hace que los resultados sean sostenibles.
Y también lo que convierte la inversión en capacidad en un activo estratégico, no en un coste recurrente.
The Bottom Line
Hoy los mercados dudan de que la mayoría de organizaciones logren capturar valor real de la IA.
Nosotros creemos que se equivocan, que esa predicción solo se cumplirá para quienes la aborden como una herramienta más o como un simple programa formativo y no como una transformación real de cómo se trabaja, cómo se toman decisiones y cómo se genera valor.
Las organizaciones que marcarán la diferencia serán aquellas que desarrollen capacidad organizativa en IA, no solo despliegue tecnológico.
La IA no es solo una herramienta: es una nueva capacidad organizativa.
El verdadero reto ya no es empezar, sino escalar con sentido y estrategia.
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La adopción acelerada de la IA impulsa la innovación, pero también abre la puerta a filtraciones de datos y riesgos de ciberseguridad. En su reciente entrevista para el medio, Isaac Cantalejo advierte del peligro de esta nueva “amenaza” digital
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BTS was recently recognized as a Top 20 Leadership Training Company by Training Industry, Inc.
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