Let me tell you about one of the most honest conversations I’ve heard about AI leadership. In a recent webinar, Don Bennion from Adobe was talking about building what he calls a “Coalition of the Willing”: the group of passionate people who drive AI adoption across his organization. But then he said something that made everyone in the room uncomfortable: “We all want to be AI champions. We all want this to further our career. If you’re not careful, that can get in the way.”

Boom. There it was. The thing everyone thinks about but nobody talks about when it comes to AI transformation initiatives.

Here’s the reality: AI represents the biggest career opportunity many of us have seen in decades. Everyone wants to be associated with success. Everyone wants to be known as the person who “gets it.” And if you don’t manage these dynamics carefully, your AI transformation will become a battlefield of competing egos instead of a collaborative effort to actually improve how work gets done.

The Hidden Challenge Nobody Discusses

Most AI transformation guides focus on technology selection, change management frameworks, and adoption metrics. What they don’t talk about is the very human reality that AI initiatives attract ambitious people who see an opportunity to accelerate their careers.

This isn’t inherently bad. You want motivated people working on important initiatives. But when multiple people are competing to be “the AI person” in your organization, you get territorial behavior, duplicated efforts, and political maneuvering that completely undermines the collaboration you actually need.

Don learned this lesson the hard way at Adobe. They had passionate people building AI solutions all over the organization, which sounds great until you realize everyone was working in isolation, protecting their projects, and competing for credit and recognition.

The breakthrough came when he shifted from trying to manage these dynamics to embracing them strategically.

Finding Your Natural AI Champions

Here’s where most organizations get the recruitment process wrong. They either assign AI responsibilities to people based on job titles or technical background, or they put out a call for volunteers and end up with people who are more interested in the prestige than the work.

Adobe took a different approach. They looked for people who were already experimenting with AI on their own initiative. Not because they were told to, not because it was in their job description, but because they were genuinely curious and saw possibilities.

Don put it this way: “A lot of people are just passionate about AI. They are not being assigned to it. I was assigned to it, this is my full-time job, this is my job description. But a lot of people are like, look, I’m just passionate about this, and I think it can do certain things better.”

These self-selected champions are gold because their motivation comes from genuine interest rather than external recognition. They’ve already done the work of convincing themselves that AI is valuable. Your job is to channel that energy, not create it from scratch.

The Anti-Ego Framework That Actually Works

The most brilliant part of Don’s approach is how he explicitly addresses the ego dynamics that usually destroy collaborative initiatives. He doesn’t pretend they don’t exist or hope people will rise above them. He names them directly and creates a framework that works with human nature rather than against it.

His core message to the coalition: “There’s so much opportunity that’s just falling on the ground. There’s plenty for everyone. If you can work together with people, leverage their ideas, amplify and magnify what they’re doing, find that white space where you can work alongside them, but be their champion. Acknowledge them, recognize them.”

This is counterintuitive but incredibly effective. Instead of competing for scarce recognition, everyone focuses on making the overall effort successful, which creates more recognition opportunities for everyone involved.

Creating Abundance Instead of Scarcity

The scarcity mindset kills AI initiatives faster than technical challenges or budget constraints. When people believe there’s only room for one AI success story in the organization, they start hoarding information, avoiding collaboration, and undermining each other’s projects.

Don’s insight is that AI transformation creates abundant opportunities for people to distinguish themselves, but only if they approach it collaboratively. When someone helps amplify a colleague’s successful AI implementation, they become associated with that success. When they share their learnings openly, they become known as a generous expert. When they help solve problems across multiple teams, they build influence that transcends organizational boundaries.

The fastest way to become known as an AI leader is to help other people succeed with AI.

Practical Steps for Building Your Coalition

If you want to replicate this approach in your organization, here’s what actually works:

Start with Natural Interest, Not Official Assignments

Look for people who are already experimenting with AI tools, asking questions about AI applications, or volunteering for AI-related projects. These people have already self-selected for genuine interest rather than career positioning.

Make Collaboration the Path to Recognition

Structure your initiatives so that individual success is tied to collective success. Instead of competing projects, create shared challenges where people win by helping each other succeed.

Create Multiple Ways to Contribute

Not everyone needs to be a technical implementer. Some people are great at identifying use cases. Others excel at change management. Some are natural evangelists. Give people different ways to be valuable so they’re not all competing for the same role.

Be Explicit About the Ego Challenge

Don’t dance around the career motivation issue. Address it directly in your coalition meetings. Acknowledge that everyone wants to advance their careers and that collaboration is actually the fastest path to doing so.

Managing the “Lone Wolf” Problem

You’ll inevitably encounter people who want to work on AI initiatives by themselves, either because they think they’re smarter than everyone else or because they want to take full credit for whatever they build.

Don’s advice here is direct: “If you’re a lone wolf, and you’re doing this all by yourself, I’m sorry to say, your likelihood of success is just not going to be there.”

This isn’t just about being nice or politically correct. It’s about practical reality. AI transformation requires diverse skills, organizational knowledge, and change management capabilities that no single person possesses. The lone wolves consistently build impressive technical solutions that nobody uses, while the collaborators build simpler solutions that transform how work gets done.

The Long-Term Career Play

Here’s what’s fascinating about organizations that build effective coalitions of AI champions: the people who focus on collective success end up with much stronger individual career outcomes than those who try to hoard credit.

When you become known as someone who helps others succeed with AI, you become the person everyone wants to work with on AI projects. When you share knowledge generously, you become a go-to resource for AI questions. When you build bridges between teams, you develop influence that extends far beyond your official role.

These are exactly the kinds of reputations that lead to promotions, interesting opportunities, and career advancement. But they only develop when people genuinely prioritize collective success over individual recognition.

What This Means for Leadership

If you’re leading AI transformation efforts, your job isn’t just to manage projects and track metrics. You need to actively shape the cultural dynamics that will determine whether talented people collaborate or compete.

This means celebrating collaborative behavior, not just individual achievements. It means creating recognition systems that reward people for helping others succeed. It means being explicit about career development opportunities and ensuring that collaboration enhances rather than threatens individual advancement.

Most importantly, it means modeling the behavior you want to see. When leaders visibly share credit, acknowledge others’ contributions, and prioritize collective success, it gives everyone else permission to do the same.

The Compound Effect of Effective Coalitions

Organizations that build effective AI coalitions don’t just see better project outcomes in the short term. They develop organizational capabilities that compound over time.

When people are comfortable sharing what they learn, knowledge spreads faster across the organization. When successful implementations get replicated rather than reinvented, you accelerate overall progress. When people trust each other to share credit fairly, they’re more willing to take risks on ambitious projects.

These cultural changes outlast any specific AI initiative and create lasting competitive advantages that are incredibly difficult for other organizations to replicate.

The Test of Your Approach

Want to know if you’re building an effective coalition of AI champions or just managing competing egos? Look at how people respond when someone else in the group has a visible success.

In healthy coalitions, people genuinely celebrate each other’s wins and look for ways to apply similar approaches in their own areas. In ego-driven groups, people minimize others’ successes and emphasize why their situation is different.

If you’re seeing the latter, you haven’t solved the ego dynamics yet. Don’t ignore this or hope it will resolve itself. Address it directly before it undermines everything else you’re trying to accomplish.

Because at the end of the day, AI transformation isn’t a technology challenge or even a change management challenge. It’s a human collaboration challenge. And the organizations that figure out how to channel competitive energy into collaborative action will be the ones that actually transform how work gets done.

Building your own coalition of AI champions and running into ego dynamics that need navigation? I’d love to help you think through strategies for creating collaboration instead of competition around AI initiatives. Connect with me on LinkedIn to explore what effective coalition building looks like in your specific organizational context.