Make got 96% of its employees building AI automations within 18 months, through an AI enablement programme that started with discovery. Sara Maldon, Head of AI Enablement at Make, told aibl in March 2026 how she did it. There was no mandatory rollout and no big training programme.
Maldon spoke to almost half the company before launching anything. She then embedded a full-time AI specialist, known internally as a “samurai”, in every department, and judged projects on business metrics instead of time saved. Here is how it worked.
All figures as stated by Sara Maldon in an interview with aibl.
Make started with discovery, not a tool mandate. Maldon ran a voluntary four-week bootcamp in her first week, and a third of the company signed up. She then held more than 160 one-to-one conversations before launching Miriwa, the company-wide programme that took AI automation building from 16% to 96%.
A samurai is a full-time AI specialist embedded in one department. Each works like an embedded product manager: learning the team’s real problems, building solutions alongside them and coaching people to use what is built. Every samurai reports to both Maldon’s team and the department VP.
Excitement gets things off the ground, but real change takes time and consistency.
Sara Maldon, Head of AI Enablement, Make
Make measures success by core business numbers, not time saved. A project that saves hours but moves no core metric does not count. Against that bar, 73% of projects moved core departmental metrics. ARR per FTE and average contract value also improved, though Maldon does not claim direct cause and effect.
The bar was set high on purpose, and Maldon expected failures. Overambitious projects showed where the real friction was. One team might have no process to act on a tool’s output. In another, data was not flowing where it was needed. Those discoveries helped fix the fundamentals.
I want to see a failure next week. Otherwise I will throw you into one.
Sara Maldon, Head of AI Enablement, Make
Sara Maldon is Head of AI Enablement at Make, the automation platform, where she built and ran the Miriwa AI adoption programme. Sara Maldon spoke to aibl in March 2026.
If your people use AI but few build with it, this is the model to borrow. The full PDF goes deeper than this page, in Sara Maldon’s own words.
For CPOs, COOs, transformation leads and digital or AI leads running AI adoption. Six pages, about an eight-minute read.
