From AI Curiosity to Mission Capacity: How Flatter Built an Internal AI Champions Model to Accelerate Innovation, Develop Its Workforce, and Prepare Leaders for an AI-Enabled National Security Environment

This white paper describes AÇAI (AI Champions for Accelerating Innovation), Flatter, Inc.'s internal workforce-development model for building AI literacy, adoption, and change leadership across the organization. Beginning in 2024 under CEO Brittany Chiang, Flatter distributed AI licenses to a small group of employees and executives, ran cross-functional experimentation sessions, and found that effective AI users were less defined by technical knowledge than by the ability to ask better questions. That insight led Flatter to fuse its existing ICF coaching expertise with AI literacy training. The paper details AÇAI's people-first philosophy, captured in the phrase "inquiry first, mission first, with a leader in the driver's seat," its nine-block Solution Coaching Canvas built on PMI's CPMAI framework, its use of PersonaOPPs for AI-enabled role-play practice, and Flatter's roadmap toward ICF Level 1 AI-specialty coaching program recognition.