We’ve been turning down work lately. More than we used to. Specifically, we’ve started declining engagements with companies that can’t name an internal Champion — a real person, at director or VP level, who’ll live inside the work day-to-day.
We do this even when the money is real, the CEO is engaged, and the work would be a fit on every other dimension. Even when it costs us a quarter’s worth of revenue. Because we’ve learned: an AI engagement without a Champion fails. Every time.
Let me explain what I mean by Champion, why it’s the deal-breaker, and what we do when the Champion isn’t there yet.
What Champion means
In an AI Office engagement, there are three internal roles on the client side:
- Sponsor — the CEO, COO, or CFO. Provides strategic direction, removes blockers, signs the agreement. Usually senior. Usually busy.
- Champion — the director or VP who lives the problem daily. Owns the workflow we’re touching. Is in every working session. Knows the existing process inside-out and is willing to redesign it.
- Builders — 1–3 people on the client team who participate in builds and learn alongside us.
The Champion is the load-bearing role. Without one, the engagement collapses by month three.
The Sponsor can authorize. The Builders can execute. Only the Champion can decide.
Why no-Champion engagements fail
I’ve watched it happen enough times now that I can describe the failure curve:
Months 1–2: Engagement starts strong. The Sponsor is engaged because the engagement is new. The team is curious. We deliver the roadmap. Energy is high.
Months 3–4: Roadmap turns into actual work. Decisions need to be made: which workflow exactly, what does success look like, who reviews the output, what’s the change-management approach for the affected team. Without a Champion, those decisions go to the Sponsor — who’s running a company and can give us 30 minutes a week, not 2 hours.
Months 5–6: Decisions backlog. Builds stall waiting for approval. Sponsor energy fades because “we’re not making progress.” Our strategist is asking for input that nobody’s positioned to give. The engagement starts feeling unproductive to both sides.
Months 7–9: Cancellation conversation. Sponsor concludes “this isn’t working.” We agree. Both sides lose.
The technology worked. The team was senior. The roadmap was good. None of it mattered because there was no Champion to translate strategic intent into operational change.
Why the Champion problem is invisible at signing
The reason this trap is hard to avoid: at signing, the Champion problem looks solvable. The Sponsor will say things like:
- “We’ll figure out who owns it as we go.”
- “Susan can be the day-to-day point person, even though she has a full plate.”
- “We’ll appoint someone in month two when we know what we need.”
- “I’ll be the Champion myself” — when the speaker is also the Sponsor, which doesn’t work, because Champion and Sponsor are different functions.
Each of these sounds reasonable in the discovery call. None of them produce a Champion. The work to identify, free up, and authorize a Champion is real work — it requires the Sponsor to make a personnel decision that affects the team whose process is changing — and that decision rarely gets made “as we go.” It gets made before the engagement starts or it doesn’t get made at all.
What we do when the Champion isn’t there yet
We don’t just turn the engagement down. We have three things to offer.
Option 1: The “name the Champion” conversation. Sometimes the Champion exists but hasn’t been named. We’ve sat on calls where the Sponsor and I worked through who in the org could plausibly take this on, what would need to come off their plate, and what authority they’d need. Sometimes that conversation produces a Champion within a week. If it does, we proceed.
Option 2: The pre-engagement workshop. If the Champion question is “we don’t have one and we’d need to develop someone,” we’ll recommend a Private Workshop ($4,500, day-long, on-site) structured specifically to surface and audition Champion candidates. By end of day, the Sponsor either has a Champion or knows they need to hire one.
Option 3: The wait. If neither of the above resolves it, we wait. We tell the Sponsor: come back when you have a Champion. We mean it. We’ve watched companies come back six months later with the Champion identified, and the engagement runs cleanly because the foundation was right.
The worst path is to take the engagement anyway and hope for the best. We’ve done that. It always ends badly.
What makes a good Champion
Not just anyone at director or VP level can be a Champion. The specific attributes that matter:
- Lives the problem daily. They’ve been complaining about the workflow we’re touching for years. They know every workaround. They want it fixed.
- Has authority to redesign. If we propose a workflow change, they can approve it — or get it approved within a week. Not a year.
- Available for ~10% of their week. Champions take real time: weekly working sessions, async approvals, post-session debriefs. If the person can’t give us four hours a week, they’re not the Champion.
- Wants to be there. A Champion who got drafted into the role hates the role. A Champion who volunteered for it owns it.
- Senior enough that the affected team will listen. Champions drive change management. They need credibility with the people whose work will change.
It’s a specific profile. Not everyone has it. The good news: in most mid-market companies, the right person is obvious. The Sponsor usually knows who it is the moment they hear the criteria. Sometimes they’re reluctant to ask that person — because that person is already overloaded — but they know.
The asymmetry
Here’s the asymmetry that justifies the discipline: a bad engagement costs us months of senior time and a client who never works with us again. A delayed engagement costs us a quarter of revenue. The math favors delayed.
We can absorb a quarter of “we’re waiting on you to name the Champion.” We can’t absorb a year of engagements that fail at month seven.
If you’re a Sponsor reading this and you’re considering an AI Office engagement: the most important thing you can do before signing is name the Champion. If you can name them today, the engagement will probably work. If you can’t, you have homework to do before the engagement starts — not after.
The honest version
I’d rather lose a deal because the Champion wasn’t named than win a deal that fails six months in. The first is recoverable. The second isn’t.
If you’re working on this question right now, that’s the conversation to have. Thirty minutes. We’ll help you figure out whether you have the Champion or whether you need to develop one before starting.
— Ross