Challenge: Scaling AI Adoption

Discovery needed to scale AI adoption across a large, federated organization, where teams worked on projects in different product areas, and had uneven, often insufficient, levels of AI literacy. Discovery’s GenAI Academy recognized that simply providing tools like Copilot wasn’t enough; people needed shared governance, responsible-use guidelines, approved tools, training and a common understanding of what AI could do. Adoption was slow at first because some employees saw AI use as “cheating,” others were too busy to experiment and overall literacy levels varied widely. Discovery had to build trust, establish guardrails, create communities of practice and give people practical, work-related use cases so AI adoption could move from small pockets of interest to broader organizational value.

According to Jonathan Zondo, head of PMO — Group Information Services (GIS), which is responsible for providing technical services for the organization, “The real challenge wasn’t deploying AI — it was helping people understand it, trust it, find time to learn it and see how it fit into their everyday work. Once literacy improved, adoption followed.” He described the challenge as a multistage change management effort rather than a technical rollout.

Approach: The “Curious PMO Conversations With AI” Campaign

The turning point came when Discovery focused on raising AI literacy across the PMO community. Zondo emphasized that when employees had common training, access to examples, a prompt library and opportunities to share ideas, adoption shifted from being mostly “push” (driven by leadership) to increasingly “pull” (employees actively seeking more AI capabilities).

This approach enabled Discovery to overcome several challenges to adoption:

Solution: Sharing Success Through a Competition

A major component of the campaign was helping project managers document AI successes. Recognizing this need, Viljoen created a framework and a series of prompts that guided participants through writing success stories, including quantitative metrics where possible. To generate excitement, the campaign culminated in a competition.

Viljoen said he realized from working with people that writing success stories is not easy. “The mindset is the challenge. People just don’t think about success. It works, OK, great, let’s move on. But what was that success? I created a framework that leads you through a series of questions, and you just answer the questions. And then we would prompt them a little bit to expand on it. I would use AI together with some guidelines that I’ve created specific for AI on how to write a success story.”

The final step was encouraging people to share their stories. Discovery set up an event, primarily in person with virtual participation. “The idea was to create a little bit of excitement about it, get people to engage with it, have a bit of fun, win something,” said Viljoen. “Each one of the PMOs had an opportunity to submit one to three of their success stories. We put together a panel of judges and awarded a winner — first, second, third place with prizes.”

Presenting a Winning Use Case

Chantelle Smit, test manager, UAT, found herself unexpectedly entered into the competition. Managing a team of testers, Smit faced a bottleneck in the labor-intensive process of creating UAT test cases. Testers could spend up to six weeks manually converting business requirements into test cases, delaying testing and creating resource constraints across the team.

Smit thought leveraging an AI-powered assistant might help. “My first thing was, there must be a way to write these cases quicker, faster, easier. I didn’t know if it was going to work, to be very honest. I just took a wild gamble.” Smit was able to reduce the effort from weeks to days, allowing testing to begin much sooner. “Something that probably would have taken us another six weeks plus, it took me two days to write almost 400 test cases with Copilot. AI for us as UAT is almost completely eliminating all the manual effort.”

Smit’s manager entered her into the competition. “I’m not a public speaker. I have an absolute phobia for it,” Smit said. “He put my hand up for me in a previous meeting to say that I will present. There were about eight or nine project managers that were competing. I was the only person there from testing.”

Smit’s use case encompassed Discovery’s view of the future of work: encouraging innovation, enhancing productivity and keeping the human in the loop. “It doesn’t take away anybody’s work or what anybody does. It just alleviates some of the manual effort. That human intervention is still so important because you do need to ask it properly for it to give you what you want,” said Smit. “AI is absolutely so powerful. It opens so many doors for you personally. If you can’t see the benefit of it opening doors for you and your work, you’re going to be left behind.”

Conclusion: AI Adoption Moves From Push to Pull

The “Curious PMO Conversations With AI” campaign is helping AI adoption at Discovery move from push to pull among the project management community. “We want more of this,” said Jonathan Zondo. “There’s starting to be that pull, but we haven’t quite measured it. I still don’t think we’ve reached a 50-50 balance. In an ideal world, it would be great if we could have a 70% pull and a 30% push because it means that the message has landed. There’s a common shared vision and a realization that if we all work together, there’s greater value that we can achieve. I think we are getting to that stage.”

Zondo said the next phase is to take the value achieved in the campaign and share it more widely. “We’ve been able to create a shared space where all the new prompts and use cases reside. And we are starting to unearth additional cases with PMI Infinity™. When we spoke about PMI Infinity during our campaign, everybody got excited. That created an even greater pull effect because now people want to get involved and understand the power and value PMI Infinity brings. As a result, we are getting more people who want to become Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification holders, which also increases our legitimacy as a project management community.”