\n<\/p>\n
Like many founders and CEOs, I worried that my company was too far behind on AI. So at first, I followed what I\u2019d seen other companies do: I planned to put an executive in charge and a team underneath to lead our AI transformation. Then I got to thinking: It\u2019s not enough for one team<\/em> to use AI. How do I get all <\/em>my 900 employees to lean in \u2014 and fast?<\/p>\n So I shut the company down for nearly a week. It inspired a wave of innovation.<\/p>\n For context, I cofounded Fetch in 2013. When shoppers use our app to scan their receipts, we give them rewards. We\u2019re a profitable, fast-growing company with a $700 million gross revenue run rate and 13 million monthly active users, and I was confident that AI could help us innovate and move even faster.\u00a0<\/p>\n I started asking my people why they weren\u2019t using AI at work, and the answer was always the same: They were too busy doing their jobs. So I thought: What if we just gave them uninterrupted time to try it out?<\/em> We\u2019d put all other work on hold and only focus on AI.<\/p>\n I called the idea AI Week. My executives pushed back and said, \u201cLet\u2019s do it for a day<\/em>.\u201d But I needed to do something big. It was important for everyone to understand how serious this was. We ended up agreeing to four days. Unless there was something urgent like a deal closing, we canceled all meetings, told clients we would be unavailable, and warned users that response times would be slower.\u00a0<\/p>\n For true innovation, you have to remove barriers so people don\u2019t hide behind the limitations. So we did a survey asking what types of projects and solutions they wanted to work on, and then assigned them to 200 teams. I also got a small task force to build a few examples in advance. In addition, we created a Slack channel for employees to submit requests for any AI tool up to $500 a month. (We\u2019d later cancel those that weren\u2019t useful.)\u00a0<\/p>\n