Scania’s AI Catalyst on adoption without a mandate

This week we’re profiling Patrik Hedljung, AI Catalyst at Scania, the Swedish truck and bus maker, where he’s responsible for AI adoption. He’s speaking at aiblLIVE London on 20 October.

He got there by an unusual route: around 25 years in learning and leadership development at Scania, then a move into IT to take AI adoption on.

“I used to be the one person in HR thinking about AI, and since I moved to IT I now see it the other way around. I’m one of few in a world where everyone thinks about AI, but very few people think about change management and leadership and adoption.”

Scania is far bigger than most of the companies we write for. The constraint he describes is not.

The job is momentum

Ask Patrik what the role involves and the answer is deliberately broad. “Anything and everything I can possibly come up with that helps move the needle in terms of getting people to use the technology once it’s in place.”

One end of it is a few standard sentences in Scania’s job ads, “in order to send a signal to applicants that Scania is an AI friendly company and that we expect people to have a positive attitude or a curious attitude.” In a company this size, finding whoever owns the template “could be a full-time job”.

The other end is hackathons around tools Scania may never buy, run “just to get people excited about a certain aspect of AI”.

“My background is not IT, so I moved into it, and I think that also colours my approach and what I do. And it’s got very little to do with the technology.”

A specific tool would be a different problem

“It’s great if we can have a handful of high value end-to-end [use] cases where we can get some quick ROI and make people happy about that. That’s excellent. And they can be lighthouse cases.”

“I also see a risk that organisations who take that approach first then become complacent about, okay, we’re doing AI. We have these five use cases, and people using these solutions don’t even necessarily know there’s AI involved when they do their work in these processes.”

“If it was a specific tool that we’re talking about, it would be different. But this is a technology that we’ve just begun scratching the surface of what we can use it for.”

“If we really want to leverage the power of AI, we need to activate everyone within the company. We need to raise the general understanding and competence around AI so that each subject matter expert, each nitty-gritty person who has a specific workflow, can start thinking about how can we use AI in this work. That’s when we’re gonna get the real effect from AI, from a general purpose technology.”

Left alone, people form fantasies and worries

Scania runs an AI literacy programme. “I don’t even want to call it a training. It’s a facilitated discussion that each team does over the course of several weeks, and the leader or manager gets help to facilitate that discussion.”

Managers run it without necessarily having all the answers. “There’s a number of questions that we need to discuss in our team, in our context, given our jobs and roles.”

“When we leave each to his own, then people are gonna form all different kinds of fantasies and worries. Some are valid and some may not be. We need to have those dialogues at scale.”

Nobody has the blueprint

“What we need to decide on a higher level is, okay, what are the methods? What does good governance look like? How do you scale? How do you take your good idea, deploy it in a compliant way, how do you scale that to other functions.”

That work isn’t finished. “We’re not there yet. Certainly not.”

His advice to leaders starting out is simple. Do not wait. “They wait for the technology, they wait for data, they wait for governance, they wait for a mandate. Nobody has the blueprint yet. And certainly not for you.”

He picks that up in October, in a session called ‘Driving AI adoption across 65,000 people without a mandate’. If you haven’t got a ticket yet, you can get one here.