LinkedIn·Wednesday, 19 August 2026·7d ago

A few months ago, we gave everyone at Rydoo a virtual judo belt to reflect their level of AI fluency. Instead of evaluating by department,…

Rydoo

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A few months ago, we gave everyone at Rydoo a virtual judo belt to reflect their level of AI fluency. Instead of evaluating by department, we developed a shared language for what good AI usage looks like at each level, plus a self-assessment that showed us where we actually stood. Three things surprised us... ➡️ Our 'AI Guild' didn’t need to be built by AI experts. Mixing proficiency levels killed the one-size-fits-all training plan early, and the question shifted from "how do we get more people using AI?" to "how do we make them more effective in their own context?" ➡️ This was about change management, and not the technology. The tools and the enthusiasm were already there throughout Rydoo. All that was missing was the channels to bring them together. ➡️ People moved faster than we planned for. Someone using AI for basic tasks one week was building automations that handled real work and saved significant time and money the next. Nobody at Rydoo has reached black belt yet, but that's fine. The point was never about getting to the top of the belt system. It was knowing which belt you are today, and then ensuring you’ve progressed by the end of the year. Two key players in the AI Guild, Senior Sales Enablement Manager, Kelly Klein, and Head of Product Marketing, Esteban Arias, wrote all about what was implemented, and how it changed life at Rydoo, function by function, as we continue to build our AI-first company. 🥋 Read about aligning AI fluency to judo belts here: https://lnkd.in/eJ87U9vw