Most large companies are stuck in the same place. Everyone has access to ChatGPT or Copilot. A few enthusiasts have built something clever on their own. IT is nervous about what is running where. And leadership is being asked what the AI strategy is, with no good answer beyond another workshop.
An AI champions program that ends in production
The Specialty Tokens AI Champions Program builds the team that closes that gap from inside your company. We are a forward-deployed AI engineering firm in Vienna, run by founders Nik Redl and Thomas Schlossmacher, and we work with organizations of roughly 1,000 to 7,000 employees across DACH and the rest of Europe.
The idea is simple. The people who know where the work hurts are already in your company. They are in finance, in sales operations, in customer service. They are not engineers, and they do not need to be. With the right training, the right tools, and a clear path to production, they become your internal AI team.
How the program works
- We look at everything you are doing. Systems, data, processes, existing AI experiments, and the rules your IT and legal teams need respected. This is where we find the first opportunities and the constraints.
- We come to you. The program runs on site, with your people, on your processes. Approved AI tools are connected to the systems your teams already use, so exercises are real work, not examples.
- We train a volunteer group of 20 to 30 champions. Mostly non-technical people, sometimes called citizen developers, who learn to build automations and agents on their own processes.
- The champions harvest use cases. They collect and rank opportunities across their departments, with owners and expected payoff, and build the first ones themselves.
- We take the best use cases to production. Our engineers build them properly, secure them, and hand them to your IT team to run. Nothing stays a prototype on someone's laptop.
- You choose what comes next. Stop after the enablement, or have us professionalize the group into a standing internal AI team.
Who owns it on your side
A champions program needs a sponsor with backing. In our engagements that is usually a head of IT, a chief AI officer, the CEO, a board member, or a head of commercial, sometimes a senior manager with a clear mandate. The sponsor sets direction and protects the group's time. We make sure they can show progress in terms the board understands: use cases in production, hours returned to the business, and risks under control.
For leadership teams that want to align first, we run an executive AI session before the program starts.
What it looks like in practice
At TimeTac, a marketing and growth team with no engineers built its own automations on our platform: 10 live in production and 117 runs in the first three weeks, 54 of them on a schedule with nobody pressing a button. An internal champion drove the adoption. The champions program applies the same model across departments, with 20 to 30 people instead of one team.
We run enablement for demanding audiences, from the investment team at Speedinvest to an executive AI series with the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber.
If you want a written picture of where your company stands before you commit, start with the free AI readiness assessment.
