Christina Gathmann

I have a new piece out today on AI Adoption in @HarvardBiz with Antonio Cabrales, José Durán @toniroldanm, and colleagues from @BBVA on why most enterprise AI programs fail and what BBVA did differently. Most large companies have a shadow AI economy. As of Summer 2025, only 40% of firms had bought official LLM subscriptions, but employees at 90%+ used consumer AI for work on the side. The standard corporate response is to restrict and monitor. The "core IT" department takes over and sees its task as reducing usage. This is the wrong reaction. Shadow AI is not a threat. It is a demand signal telling you that productivity gains exist. BBVA deployed ChatGPT Enterprise company-wide in a secure cloud, compressing risk assessment, legal review, and GDPR compliance into two months. Their bet was that unmanaged hidden usage is more dangerous than rapid managed deployment. The rollout leveraged "FOMO" (fear of missing out): only 3,000 initial licenses, allocated competitively with a "use it or lose it" policy. This turned enterprise AI from a mandate into a privilege. Then they built an Adoption Network: Champions, Co-Champions, and 200 Wizards (power users) who provided peer-to-peer support. The Community of Practice became the most active internal forum in BBVA's history. Within a year, active users grew from 3,000 to 11,000. 83% use it weekly. Employees built 4,800+ custom GPTs. In audit, 99% of 600 auditors worldwide became active users, saving 3-4 hours per week. In Mexico, an insurance-advisory GPT cut query response time by 92% for 4,400 branch managers. These tools were built by frontline employees, not by IT. A human always owns the output. No direct writes to core systems. If you want enterprise AI to work, stop building centralized plans. Trust the people who already figured out where AI helps. Give them a secure environment, clear rules, and a network to share what they learn. hbr.org/2026/04/the-hidden-d…

Back online (still no light here). Lessons from Spain after a really weird day (no electricity, no 4G, no WiFi) for the world 1. Go out and buy a pocket battery-power radio. It was really disconcerting to have no way to know what is going on. 2. Buy a battery powered torche . There were none left in shops. 3. Keep cash. I had none. 4. Keep spare batteries.

The Netherlands is Europe’s best-governed country. Unfortunately, it is paralyzed. Construction is freezing up, and Europe’s most valuable tech company (ASML) is threatening to leave. What happened should be a warning for every other EU member state. THREAD (1/11)