Zero mandate, zero budget: AI adoption at Scania

Speaking in the Workforce track at aiblLIVE, Patrik Hedljung, Scania’s AI Adoption Manager, described trying to encourage AI adoption across a business of 65,000 employees with “zero mandate, zero budget and zero strategy”.

With a background in learning and leadership development, he’d first tried to drive adoption within HR. When that failed to gain traction, he approached IT, arguing that technical expertise and change management needed to work together. He later moved into a role there.

Patrik argued that organisations are trying to “govern a movement into existence”, starting with policies, data and governance. Traditional change programmes can take three to five years, he said, while AI changes weekly. His approach has been to look for opportunities to make progress rather than wait for a complete strategy.

The EU AI Act gave Patrik an opening. Scania had to address the Act’s AI literacy requirements, regardless of how little attention senior leadership had given AI adoption.

Patrik saw a chance to do something more useful than conventional compliance training. “You don’t really want to own training, do you?” he asked the legal team. They didn’t. So he offered to develop a programme designed to meet the requirements, with legal responsible for signing it off. They agreed.

The agreement gave him responsibility for developing training, but not a workforce obliged to take part.

Seven hours of conversation

The AI literacy programme Patrik developed lasts seven hours and is designed for teams to complete together.

His thinking is that teams already include people using AI. Rather than bringing in outside experts to tell employees what they could do with it, the programme encourages colleagues to share what they’re learning and explore applications in their own work.

The material needs to keep changing. Patrik suggested that “AI buoyancy” might be a better description than AI literacy. It’s not a level you reach. You have to keep treading water as AI develops.

More than 2,000 employees went through an earlier version, with uptake entirely organic.

“Seven hours is quite a bit of time in an industrial company where people count seconds,” he said. “So those taking seven hours is a pretty good KPI.”

Getting things moving

Patrik also wanted AI skills to feature in recruitment, rather than relying entirely on upskilling existing employees. For two years, he’d been trying to get AI expectations included in Scania’s job adverts. He spent a year discovering that the company didn’t have a global template.

He now has an AI agent scanning internal job adverts each week for the wording he’d been proposing. Recently, it appeared in an advert for a senior accountant, not a technology role. The hiring manager told him it was working well: “In hindsight, it’s so obvious that this is something we should do.”

“We are definitely moving from organic growth, early adopters, bottom-up, to now we’re getting the top-down attention,” Patrik said.

His closing message to individual contributors: “We talked a lot about agents. I think agency is the more important.”