Sendbird CEO reveals elite AI adoption playbook: gamified quests, token leaderboards, and builder templates

The Gist

• Sendbird’s Automators platform gamifies AI adoption with quests, XP, and rewards like executive tea time
• Marketing team built a live swag store with Stripe integration in days, no engineering support
• Non-technical builders use secure, compliant templates to ship projects faster than traditional roadmaps

• The most successful AI transformations treat internal tooling as a product, not a program.
• When you give creative teams builder capabilities, they’ll create things that would never make it onto a traditional product roadmap.
• The biggest unlock for non-technical builders is creating secure, compliant templates they can build on top of.
• The goal isn’t just to use AI during work hours but, rather, to smooth the curve so AI works around the clock.
• The most important hiring criteria for AI-first companies are curiosity, agency, and energy—not tenure or experience.
• Leadership has to model the behavior, not just mandate it.

• Create a gamified internal marketplace for AI tooling and automation requests.
• Develop secure, compliant templates for non-technical builders to accelerate production.
• Monitor token usage to identify AI adoption gaps and tailor enablement programs.
• Build a cross-functional AI task force to unblock challenges and accelerate iteration.

• 100M tokens/day (AI God tier in token usage)
• 20x more iterations (Impact of fast CI on AI coding velocity)
• 25% of current time (Goal for reducing Notion’s CI time)