Related question
Who inside my company is already using AI, and should I find them?
Short answer
Yes, and they are easier to find than you think. Every company has people quietly using AI to improve their own work or experimenting in the margins. Pull them in, recognize them, and build them into your process. They are already doing the work of adoption for free.
Look sideways before you look outside. The gold is already on your payroll.
These are the people closest to the messiest workflows, which is exactly why they went looking for a better way. They know what is broken and what is repeatable. What they lack is authority, budget, and a channel to tell anyone what they have learned.
Bringing them in does three things at once. It gives you an accurate picture of what is actually in use in your building, which is almost never what leadership assumes. It gives you a starting list of use cases grounded in real operational pain rather than in a vendor's case study. And it converts the informal enthusiasm that was going to happen anyway into something the organization can see, evaluate, and build on.
Recognize the behavior openly. When someone takes initiative, experiments, or shares a prompt or a tool that works, say so publicly. That is how momentum builds, and it costs nothing.