AI adoption programme for three different organisational levels (Top Management, Middle Management, Professional) developed for service and manufacturing companies.
The need
In service and manufacturing companies, AI adoption efforts almost always focus on two extremes: on the one hand, knowledge of the available tools, and on the other, the impact of AI on business competitiveness.
In between, the very element that determines whether investment in AI generates value or remains on paper is overlooked: the training and onboarding of the people who are expected to use it every day in their roles.
The problem becomes more serious when organisations attempt to fill this gap with a single course “imposed” across the entire organisation. A C-level executive and a professional do not need the same AI literacy: the former must make decisions about strategy, governance and investments without delegating their understanding; the latter must concretely transform their daily activities. A generic course risks being too technical for decision-makers and too abstract for those carrying out the work — and failing to address middle management, which must translate strategy into operational practice without dedicated tools.
There is also a variable that the numerous off-the-shelf courses systematically ignore: every company starts from a different level of maturity. A programme calibrated to the wrong level either demonstrates too little or starts from assumptions that the organisation has not yet reached.
For HR and L&D, the question becomes: how can we build a programme that speaks the language of each organisational level, starting from where the company actually is — not where it “should” be?
How we worked
For service and manufacturing companies, we designed an AI adoption programme specifically for three organisational levels — Top Management, Middle Management and Professional — each with its own customised programme, calibrated to the client's actual AI maturity.
The common method for all three levels: four steps
Each training programme guides people through the same progression:
- Know: what AI is, what it can and cannot do
- Understand: recognise one's own way of working with AI
- Ideate: identify where AI creates value in one's own work
- Use: concretely build and use an AI tool (with radically different content, depth and activities for each level.
- Top Management — a one-day Executive Learning Journey designed for C-suite executives, board members and general managers. Zero technical jargon, zero operational exercises: the focus is on AI Value Chain mapping, competitive disruption scenarios, investment criteria, impact on roles and a first draft of an AI governance framework.
- Middle Management — a workshop dedicated to those who translate the strategic decisions of the top team into daily action: how to apply AI in their team's processes, how to manage change and people's resistance, how to become a credible point of reference during the transition for those who report to them.
- Professional — a highly experiential day based on real cases brought to the classroom by participants: from writing effective prompts to summarising documents, from decision-making support using real data to a dedicated module on risks, bias and responsible use.
The proprietary platforms that make the programme concrete
To support the workshops, we use two tools developed internally by Base 9:
- AI Based Challenge© — simulations in realistic business scenarios in which participants work with an AI chat trained on the case, not a script. Proprietary algorithms observe individual behaviours and processes (cognitive style, operational efficiency, exploration) to make participants aware of how they integrate AI into their work.
- AI Workspace — a protected environment for building RAG systems using real company documents, where people can conceive and develop an AI-based service, experimenting with all the methodological and technical steps that may be involved. This work can be carried out using real content from the client's organisation.
This approach is consistent with the principle that guides Base 9's work: competencies do not exist in the abstract, but are always a function of the role, the scope of autonomy and the range of responsibilities of those who exercise them — this applies to soft skills as well as to AI adoption.
The results
- Awareness of the opportunities and implications related to the adoption of I
- Each level leaves with concrete outputs, not slides to reread.
- The programme is designed around measurable effectiveness objectives and includes a pathway for transferring content and experiences into everyday work.