You Can't Mandate Curiosity: How Informa Moves from AI Adoption to Enablement

Logins and prompt counts tell you people have opened the tool. They don't tell you whether anyone's work has changed. In this episode, Andy Lambert, co-founder of AcademyAI, talks to Donna Lovitt-Edwards, Head of AI Fluency at Informa, about how a 15,000-person business is shifting from AI adoption to genuine enablement.

Donna's starting point is simple: you can mandate access, but you can't mandate curiosity. Instead of pushing tools at people, Informa creates pull. Its learning labs start with a real bottleneck in someone's workflow rather than with AI, and attendees vote on which problems to solve. Everyone leaves with a new way of doing their own work, and some leave having learned that a problem isn't one AI can solve, which is fine too.

Donna explains how she measures enablement by working with finance to put a value on time saved, including a sales team targeting a 3% lift in conversions that saw 2% within two months. She talks about the loud 5% who already love AI and the silent 95% she's really trying to reach, and why some of the strongest resistance has come from early careers colleagues worried about whether their skills will stay relevant and about AI's environmental impact. She also covers why human in the loop is a design decision rather than a slogan, how Informa's AI Innovation Council weighs risk against value before ideas reach production, and why she believes AI transformation should sit with HR rather than IT.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Informa at a glance
01:47 From sales and L&D to Head of AI Fluency
05:13 Shifting from adoption to enablement
06:51 How to measure enablement
09:02 Being a super connector
10:48 Why you can't mandate curiosity
13:00 The loud 5% and the silent 95%
13:42 How Informa's learning labs work
19:21 Understanding resistance
20:39 The surprising sceptics: early careers colleagues
24:07 Human in the loop as a design decision
26:44 Prioritising ideas through the AI Innovation Council
32:42 Colleague-built apps and the internal marketplace
34:35 Commitment from the top
37:12 Finding the right person to lead AI transformation
38:01 Why AI should sit with HR
39:34 Fail fast, learn quick, move on
40:10 Where to find Donna

Connect with Donna
LinkedIn: Donna Lovitt-Edwards

Learn more about AcademyAI: academyai.co

#AITransformation #AIFluency #LearningAndDevelopment #FutureOfWork #AIAdoption