From seeds to strategy: A CEO's guide to driving AI urgency across the organization

Fast Company

18-07-2025

The AI race is on, but many organizations are still stretching at the starting line, unsure how to get their teams moving. They look around and wonder: How fast should we run? What kind of pace do we keep? What's everyone else doing?
For Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca, an AI-powered revenue execution platform used by leading high-consideration purchase brands in the B2C space, adopting AI across an organization requires clarity, discipline, trust, and a willingness to focus on setting your own pace.
'You're not competing with AI,' Johnson says. 'You're competing with the companies who are using it.' That mindset is driving how he's brought AI urgency to every level of his company, without triggering chaos, confusion, or risk. From experimentation to orchestration, Johnson has led with AI optimism, structure, and monitoring for measurable returns, and that mindset has rippled throughout the entire organization.
START WITH CLARITY AND TRUST
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Before launching any AI initiative, Invoca established clear privacy guardrails. 'We started with nuanced rules, but no one could follow them, so we needed a rule everyone could remember,' says Johnson. He knew trust, both inside the company and with customers in regulated industries like finance, insurance, and healthcare, would be essential to scale responsibly. 'So we asked: would you put this data on the website? If yes, it's public. If not, it's confidential, and it stays out of open AI platforms. That's a non-negotiable.
That clarity aligned teams quickly. Invoca split tool use accordingly. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity, and similar platforms are approved for public data. For anything company-confidential, they use Google's Gemini, since the company already uses the Google Cloud enterprise workplace ecosystem and has vetted its security controls.
LET A THOUSAND FLOWERS BLOOM
Like many organizations, Invoca's AI journey started with curiosity. When generative AI exploded into public awareness in late 2022, Johnson gave his teams room to experiment.
'Our first phase was all about letting a thousand flowers bloom,' says Johnson. 'We wanted teams to tinker, explore, and learn.' That open stance invited creativity and demystified the technology. But it also revealed where the adoption structure was missing.
'Soon, we realized that enthusiasm wasn't enough,' he says. 'What worked in marketing might also work in finance. But the people doing that work didn't know how to find each other.'
So, Johnson moved from permission to pattern recognition. 'My wife loves succulents,' he says. 'They're the kind of plant where you can snip off a piece, move it somewhere new, and it'll thrive.' That became his metaphor for AI's adoption: cross-pollination. If someone in customer success was doing something useful with AI, Invoca's leadership team would spot it and 'transplant' it into other parts of the business. To make this real, Johnson appointed a leader responsible for AI adoption across departments. Their job wasn't to centralize AI efforts, but to act as a connector. 'We weren't looking for a technologist. We were looking for someone curious, connected, and cross-functional—someone who could spot what's working and help it spread.'
START WHERE YOU CAN MEASURE
One of Johnson's smartest strategies has been to focus AI investment where impact is easiest to prove. 'Marketing is a great place to start,' he says. 'It already has a strong measurement framework. You know your cost per acquisition, your conversion rates. So, when you apply AI, you can see what moves.'
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By contrast, areas like engineering or internal comms often lack those metrics. 'That doesn't mean AI isn't helpful there, it just means it's harder to prove ROI,' he adds. 'Before you apply AI to your workflow, ask yourself: How well do I measure this part of the business already?' Because you can't measure performance unless you have a strong baseline. That's more than operational advice, it's strategic scaffolding. 'If you're asking for budget to invest in AI, you need to tie it to business outcomes,' Johnson says. 'Measurement maturity makes that possible.'
ALIGN METRICS BEFORE YOU SCALE
AI is most powerful when it breaks down silos. At Invoca, Johnson has pushed to create connective tissue between departments, especially those that touch any point of a customer journey.
'Our customers are large consumer brands,' he says. 'A typical buyer purchase in their space might start with an online ad, continue through a website visit, and end with a call to a contact center. But marketing, web, and call center teams often have different KPIs. That makes it hard to improve the holistic buyer journey.'
Invoca's technology enables brands to use AI to unify data across those silos. 'We can now help customers analyze conversations that happen in the contact center and feed that intelligence back into ad targeting,' Johnson says. 'So our customer marketing teams no longer fly blind. They use AI to see exactly what's converting, what's not, and have space to ask themselves why.'
The result? Invoca customers have seen 20-40% improvements in ad spend efficiency because AI helps them close the loop between lead generation and revenue realization.
THE ROLE OF THE CEO: SET THE TONE, THEN GET OUT OF THE WAY
AI adoption within an organization doesn't need micromanaging, but it does need leadership.
Johnson's approach: Be vocal, be visible, and lead with your values.
He regularly speaks to employees about why AI matters not just to the company, but to their careers. 'If you want to stay competitive, you need to learn this stuff,' he tells them. 'It's not here to replace you. It's here to level you up.'
He also leans on cultural optimism. 'I believe most people want to do the right thing. But they're also creatures of habit. So when it comes to driving AI urgency, sometimes you have to jostle them just enough to start trying something new.'
The lesson? The AI starting gun has already fired. At Invoca, the team isn't just running—they're already out front, and they've set the adoption pace. Urgency doesn't mean chaos. It means alignment, creativity, and trust. And that's exactly what it takes to lead the pack.