What would you have done? BBVA opened AI to 125,000 employees without ever telling them what to do

In late 2024, Spanish bank BBVA finds that teams are already piecing together their own AI uses outside any framework. Leadership has three options: A) mandate a single IT-approved AI tool, top-down and compulsory; B) let each team build freely, with no governance; C) open a secure environment on limited, voluntary access, then let the most advanced users train their peers. BBVA chooses C. The result 18 months later: more than 11,000 active users, roughly 4,800 internal tools built by employees themselves, and 2 to 5 hours saved per person per week. The lesson: low adoption was not a lack of appetite on the ground, but a lack of a legitimate channel to express it — and imposing it by mandate would have killed that appetite.

Source: Harvard Business Review, "The Hidden Demand for AI Inside Your Company," April 14, 2026.