AI literacy training gave Scania its route to adoption at scale. Patrik Hedljung, AI Adoption Manager at the truck maker, told aiblLIVE London 2026 how he drove AI adoption across 65,000 people with zero mandate, zero budget and zero strategy.
His answer was to treat adoption as a social movement and act on openings as they appeared. The EU AI Act became the biggest one. Here is how he used it.
All figures as stated on stage by Patrik Hedljung.
It turned an EU AI Act obligation into a seven-hour course that teams take together. Hedljung won ownership from the legal department, which signs off the content. The course is built on dialogue, covers compliance, agentic AI and the team’s own use cases, and is facilitated digitally so it scales.
Instead of a 15-minute mandatory e-learning that people hate, we produced a 7-hour dialogue that actually people thought was valuable.
Patrik Hedljung, AI Adoption Manager, Scania
Because AI moves faster than a multi-year plan. Hedljung says a sequential three to five year method will be overtaken before it starts, since preconditions change weekly. He uses force field analysis instead, watching the forces for and against change and acting whenever a window opens.
Treat it as a movement and start before the rulebook. Hedljung partnered with IT, which knew the technology but not change management. He puts tools in the hands of experts and helps spread what they build. Compliance still calls him in, about once a month, which he sees as the right balance.
Hiring for AI skills. Hedljung proposed adding a sentence or two about AI to every Scania job advert. After two years, the wording appeared in a senior accountant advert, and the hiring manager said it was working well. Hedljung sees Scania now moving from bottom-up growth to top-down attention.
We talk a lot about agents, but I think agency is the more important thing to have and nurture.
Patrik Hedljung, AI Adoption Manager, Scania
Patrik Hedljung is AI Adoption Manager at Scania. He spent 30 years in learning and leadership development before moving into IT to drive AI adoption. He spoke on the Workforce track at aiblLIVE London on 20 October 2026.
If you are driving AI adoption without formal authority, this is a playbook to borrow. The full PDF goes deeper than this page, in the speaker’s own words.
For HR and L&D leaders, AI adoption leads, CIOs and compliance teams. Five pages, about a seven-minute read.
