Last week I let myself sit in a win. That sentence alone feels wild to type. My default is to credit everyone else and quietly plan for what might break next. But I'm practicing a new rule: if I'd own the failure, I'm allowed to own the success.

The project: our AI engineering team had piloted an internal chatbot for support reps. Early tests looked promising, but they hadn't begun to drive adoption when I was brought in to manage the project. That meant translating "cool pilot" into "everyday workflow." I worked with engineers, enablement, and CX leadership to put in the boring but necessary plumbing: reliable data refreshes so answers stayed current, a feedback loop so trust could grow, and training integration so new hires learned with the tool, not around it.

What changed: the assistant became a daily habit across hundreds of reps, serving 15k+ chats each month. As part of a broader onboarding training revamp, it helped cut the training time roughly in half, sped up new-hire ramp by about a third, and contributed to a low six-figure annual savings. More important than any metric, it proved AI could be scaled inside core operations, not just demoed.

What I learned:

• Drivers matter. I didn't execute every task (in fact, very few), but I did align the pieces that unlocked momentum.
• Adoption beats novelty. Data hygiene, feedback, and training aren't glamorous, and they are the work.
• Tell the story with evidence. We used AI to cluster user feedback into themes and quotes, then shared those back with stakeholders to reinforce trust and direction. Then this served as the catalyst to my personal reflection as a Project Manager.

I still feel the tug of "you didn't build it, so you can't claim it." Here's the reframe I'm keeping: I didn't write the code. I drove the outcome. And that counts.

AI Council Diary

I'm the rep for our Programs team for our internal CX AI Council. Each month we're tasked with finding and shipping a team-wide workflow that actually moves our metrics. This is month one of working on this prjoject.

What broke this week:

• My enterprise account had provisioning hiccups, so I led our kickoff brainstorm without access to the very tool we were supposed to use.
• We discovered a constraint: in ChatGPT Projects, dropping Google Drive links doesn't behave like pasting links in free chats.
• "Just add instructions" didn't fix it. We need a truly living document reference - one drive file that's always up-to-date and reusable across projects - because that's how we manage records. We're still working through this issue.

What worked (small win):

We wrote a crisp problem statement, mapped constraints, and defined success criteria. Everyone left clear on the job to be done, not the tool to be used.

Book Stack

I bought three new books in the realm of AI in the last week.

I've started Project Management in the Age of AI. It was published a little over a year ago. I'm about 25% through it, and it has good tactical strategies, but some of it is already outdated, and it made me think... how will anyone continue to write books that give advice on using AI if in one year's time the strategies will be outdated?

Have you read any of these books? I'd love to know what you thought!

Fun AI this week: Gemini Storybook

I tried Gemini's Storybook Gem to make an illustrated gift for my husband's 19-year work anniversary (his last lap before 20.) I wrote out his career story outline and gave Gemini the instructions for how I wanted the story to sound. In less than a few minutes, I had a 20-page story complete with illustrations. It took me 2-3 iterations of revisions to get to something I really liked, but then the real hangup was there's not a good way to actually export this to print or do anything with it. To be fair, I do think this Gem is still experimental, so maybe that'll come in the future. For now, I'd have to basically screenshot, or replicate page by page in Canva if I wanted to actually print it - which I might do.

Life Lately

Since she hasn't made an appearance in the newsletter yet, allow me to introduce you to my dog, Reese. She's an Australian Cattle Dog. She's as sassy as ever and so ambitiously rolled in something foul-smelling at the school the other day, but she couldn't be any more proud of herself on a daily basis.