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I've been running AI workshops with transit leaders across the country, and the same question keeps coming up: "How do we get our whole agency using this?"

The first instinct is always top-down. Get the board on board, issue a directive, mandate a tool… I get it, that's how we've always done things. But I keep watching it fail, and I think I know why.

Think about your mid-level maintenance manager. The one who's been doing things his way for fifteen years and isn't exactly rushing to experiment with new technology. If the CEO sends an email saying "we're adopting AI," what's he going to do? Probably nothing. Maybe he opens ChatGPT once, types something awkward, gets a weird answer, and closes the tab forever. But when his peer in the garage — the guy he works alongside in the trenches every day — starts automating maintenance logs and saving an hour a week, he's going to lean over and say, show me how you did that.

That is adoption. It won’t come from a mandate or a memo… it comes from watching a peer doing something visibly better. And thinking, “Hey, I could do that too.”

I've started calling this the electric current 💡⚡. Like turning on a light, you need charge from two directions — leadership at the top saying yes, we support this, and individuals at the bottom saying yes, I'm actually using this and it's working. When those two connect in the middle, the current flows through the whole organization. And the light turns on.

So here's what I recommend after you've got your AI policy in place — the green light with two guardrails. Assemble what I'm calling your AI Task Force.

This isn't a committee, and it's definitely not a working group that meets monthly to review a strategy document nobody reads. It's a small group of your most eager AI experimenters (I call them the AI Leaders) who come together every week or two to share what they tried, what worked, and what flopped. Then they go back to their departments and do it where people can see.

Two rules make this work. First, it has to be cross-departmental — operations, planning, finance, maintenance, admin, IT. If your task force lives in one department, then adoption will stay in one department. Second (and I can’t emphasize enough just how important this is), it has to span every level of your org chart. Not just directors. You need your C-suite and your dispatcher, your maintenance manager and your staff-level admin. I showed this as a visual in a recent roundtable with transit directors — representation of every department, at all levels — and you could see the 💡 go on. 

That grid is your ⚡. It will 💡 your whole agency.

Everyone in your organization is encouraged to experiment. But your task force members are the ones who'll naturally lean in harder, share more openly, and be visible doing it. They don't need formal authority to spread adoption, they just need to be in the room doing the work differently.

Wire the current. Then let it flow. 💡⚡🤖

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Go shatter your glass ceiling.