Copilot Catalyst Lesson 9: Building an AI-Enabled, AI-Ready Organization
Back in lesson 3, I wrote about the Army Air Corps training program during World War II. America realized it had fewer than 5,000 trained pilots and a global war on the horizon. There was no time for traditional peacetime programs. Within five years, more than 250,000 had gone through the program. By 1943, they were training almost 100,000 pilots a year.
The way they pulled it off was not by teaching people to fly one specific aircraft. They built adaptable pilots. People who understood how flight worked, who could recover from errors, and who could pivot quickly when they found themselves in a cockpit they had never seen before. The speed forced them to focus on the only things that mattered: judgment, adaptability, the ability to figure it out under pressure.
I have been thinking about that story as we wrap up this series on the lessons learned from our Copilot Catalyst program. In this series, we have walked through eight specific insights:
Leaders Go First, or Nothing Goes Anywhere
Sprint Beats Marathon
Teach People to Fish; Don’t Give Them Cool Tips
You Get Three Chances to Make a First Impression
Culture Is Contagious; So Is Resistance.
Copilot Is the First Step, Not the Destination
Fertilizer Helps Growth; Crops Justify Funding
Curate a Business-First AI Strategy, Not AI-First Business Strategy
These lessons are real. They came from watching what worked and what didn’t across multiple rollouts, but if you have been reading closely, you might have noticed something.
None of them are really about Copilot.
There Is No Magic Framework
If you read enough content on AI adoption, you will notice a pattern. A lot of voices promise easy solutions if you follow a simple framework: Five steps to transformation, three pillars of success, the secret to seamless adoption, and on and on. There is always a “key point” that if you just plug that into your equation, everything will balance out.
But real work is messy. It has overlapping domains and budgetary constraints that force hard tradeoffs. It has resistances that cannot be wished away by a catchy engagement tip or a well-designed workshop. The politics are real, the skepticism is rooted in experience, and the competing priorities do not pause.
We wrote eight lessons because those were the ones that rose to the top when we sat down to outline this series, but it could easily have been ten or fifteen or fifty. The specifics of what your organization needs depend entirely on where you are starting from, what your leadership dynamics look like, and how much scar tissue you carry from previous technology rollouts.
We don’t have a universal prescription because there is no universal patient, and the reality is that this work is going to get a lot harder before it gets easier. Technology is moving fast, expectations are rising, and organizations that think they can shortcut the hard work can suddenly find themselves having never left the starting line.
From our experience in the field, these lessons are even more valuable when you step back, look at them holistically, and see what emerges when the pieces work together.
From Isolated Tactics to Organizational Reflex
None of these eight lessons, executed in isolation, will likely produce an AI-enabled, AI-ready organization. You can get your leaders engaged, but if you do not teach people to fish, you end up with enthusiastic executives and a dependent workforce. You can anchor everything in business problems, but if you do not build fluency, your teams will still be waiting for IT to figure out what the technology can do.
Copilot is Microsoft’s current offering. It will evolve. It could even be replaced. Something better will almost certainly come along, and when it does, the organizations that treated adoption as a new-features training program can find themselves back at the starting line.
The organizations that do the harder work of thinking beyond the technology at hand can end up in a different position. They can have embedded AI expertise not just in a tech incubator or an IT department, but in every department across every function. When the next technology shift happens, they will be ready to pivot. The company will have embedded strategic adaptability into the fabric of their enterprise because the organization has taken the time and effort to build it there.
Strategic Adaptability Is the Product
That is what the Air Corps built back in 1938: not pilots for one aircraft, but pilots who could fly anything. When the next plane came along, they were ready. The specific aircraft was the project. The adaptability was the real product.
That is what the Air Corps was training for. The same is true here.
We don’t know what AI will look like in three years. Neither does Microsoft or Google or anyone else who is honest about the trajectory of this technology. The models will get better. The interfaces will change. New categories of tools will emerge that we cannot anticipate today.
Some organizations will be perpetually catching up, treating each new capability as a separate adoption challenge, always feeling a step behind, burning out their teams on tool after tool.
Others will have built something different. They will have leaders who engage with new technology as a matter of course. They will have employees who know how to learn and adapt. They will have cultures where experimentation is normal and sharing discoveries is expected. When the next thing arrives, they will absorb it the way a healthy organization absorbs any change. Not without effort, but without starting from scratch either.
The question is this: Is your organization training your people to fly a particular plane? Or are you training them to have the judgment and adaptability to figure out the next big thing under pressure?
The Takeaway
Our Copilot Catalyst is never really about Copilot. It is about using a structured rollout as the mechanism for building something that lasts. It is about building leaders who engage, teams that learn, and cultures that adapt to rapid change. It means anchoring strategies in real business problems, not just tech goals or cool products. That’s the only way to become truly ready for the future.
Strategic adaptability is the enduring product. Everything else is just the project.
Next Steps: Let’s Compare Notes
If this series resonated with you, we would love to hear your take. Does this match your experience in the trenches? Where do you disagree?
Join the Conversation: Drop a comment at the LinkedIn post linked below. We share these ideas to sharpen our own thinking, and the best way to do that is to test these ideas against the reality you are seeing.
Share the Knowledge: If you know a leader who is currently stuck in the “trough of disillusionment” with their AI rollout, please pass this along.
Connect: If you want to discuss the specifics of your own transformation, the team at FlexPoint Consulting is always happy to compare notes with others who are on this journey.
Thanks for following along!