Making AI Fun Is Serious Business

By Heidi Jaros, MSOL, SPHR

October 3, 2025

Think about the people you know who are crushing it with AI right now. Are you more likely to hear them say:

• “My boss said we really need to start integrating AI.”

• “Our CEO is really pushing this AI thing.”

• “I’d better figure this out or I might lose my job.”

Or do they sound more like this?

• “I just made the coolest thing with ChatGPT today!”

• “I was playing around with Claude and figured out something wild…”

• “I cannot believe what AI can do—it’s going to make my job so much easier!”

Exactly. It’s the latter.

Take a scroll through posts by AI experts and influencers like Allie K. Miller and Ruben Hassid. What do you see? Curiosity. Tinkering. Discovery. You won’t find feeds full of dire warnings or cascade-style OKR templates. They’re filled with experiments, hacks, and “holy cow, look at this!” moments.

So why, when we bring AI into the workplace, do we put on such serious faces?

The Power of Play

Think about the last time you picked up a new hobby. It started with a spark of interest. Something caught your attention, made you curious or looked fun enough to try. You gave it a shot. At first you stumbled but then you began to see progress. That progress pulled you in deeper.

Now you weren’t just dabbling—you were invested. You had spent time, built some skill and maybe even shared your progress with others. And here’s where it really sticks: the incentives kick in. You feel the confidence of improvement, the pride of winning small victories and maybe even the satisfaction of getting a tangible reward like placing in a contest or race. Suddenly it’s not just something you dabble in. It becomes part of your habits, part of your identity and part of your joy.

That is exactly how AI adoption works. Curiosity sparks practice, practice fuels personal investment and the rewards along the way make people want to keep going—not because they have to but because they want to.

Experimentation and play are not frivolous. They are the foundation of adoption. When people feel free to try, stumble and share without judgment, they build confidence, creativity and momentum. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety shows that teams innovate faster when people trust that mistakes will not be punished. Tim Brown, cofounder of IDEO, has long argued that play at work is not about being silly, but about creating the freedom to experiment, suspend judgment and explore possibilities without fear of being wrong. His work shows that playful mindsets open the door to curiosity and discovery, which are essential for innovation.

Creating space for this kind of play sends a powerful signal. It tells employees they are encouraged to explore, that curiosity matters and that failure is part of the process. Think of your team as a mini lab where it is safe to test, learn and laugh together.

For AI Adoption, Play Beats Traditional Cascade OKRs & Project-Based Change Management Models 

The truth is these methods are just too slow to keep up with the pace of change. AI capabilities are changing rapidly, yet many organizations default to old cascade methods and complicated change management programs for adoption. Senior leadership writes a grand vision, then pushes down OKRs, strategic frameworks and multi-step change plans. That may have worked when changes were slower and more predictable. Today it’s a bottleneck.

Recent change research from Gartner shows that change is more successful when employees and managers are equipped with strong “change reflexes” (skills and instincts to adapt), not when change is imposed top down. When executives try to micromanage or overly design every AI project, approval cycles slow. Things get stuck in planning. Teams wait. Momentum stalls. But when you focus first on play, on sparking ideas, getting people confident, surfacing use cases quickly and linking those to real metrics (productivity, quality, efficiency), you get a faster feedback loop. You move from “wouldn’t it be cool” to “wow we just saved 15% time on this” quickly.

Advice to Senior Leaders: Know Your Role

Senior leaders play a critical role in AI adoption, but it is not about prescribing detailed solutions. Their job is to be vocal champions of AI, weaving it into the company’s strategic priorities and making clear that it matters. At the same time, they must avoid being overly prescriptive.

The most effective support comes from creating the conditions for adoption to thrive. That means committing real time, resources and enablement at the line manager, team and individual level. Some actions you might consider to show your support are:

• Consult with your People team. People teams are where your best skills for change management, adult education and employee engagement live. Top experts are advising organizations to have their People teams lead adoption efforts and so should you!

• Enable line leaders. Conduct workshops to get line leaders comfortable with AI themselves. Provide them with facilitation tools to run their own team workshops and experimentation and idea-sharing cadences. If your leaders are having fun and loving the tech, their enthusiasm will naturally cascade to their teams.

• Be the spark. Drop into team meetings or all-hands to highlight quick AI wins and make it clear you want exploring AI to be fun.

• Fuel the fun. While your line leaders are inspiring their individual teams to play and practice with AI in ways that are specific to their jobs and needs, you can sponsor enterprise-wide hackathons or challenges that give the best ideas organization-wide recognition (and cross-pollinate great ideas across team lines to boot!)

• Back the winners. Put real money, headcount and tech support behind the pilots that prove impact so they scale quickly.

In short, senior leaders should provide vocal support, but lead by enabling bottom-up results rather than issuing top-down mandates.

Play Your Way Forward

AI adoption is a culture shift, not a checklist. If you want your teams to take this seriously, give them permission to play. The more fun they have exploring, the faster they’ll turn play into progress and progress into real impact.

Start small and keep it practical. For example:

• Write and tell fairy tales. Ask your team to write a “fairy tale” about what their ideal job or workday would look like if they could slay the administrative, efficiency and other annoying dragons that keep them from doing the work they love most. It’s a fun exercise that can uncover some of the best AI use cases for your team and get them excited to experiment with AI to solve for them.

• Set aside “play time.” Encourage people to block an “AI Power Hour” or put “AI Playtime” on their calendars each week for free exploration. Make that time sacred and remove other, low-value work from your team’s plate so they can focus without feeling burdened by experimentation.

• Create “buddy systems” to encourage collaboration. Creative problem-solving often benefits from more than one mind focusing on an idea. Ask your team to buddy up to experiment on a specific use case together.

• Keep the spark alive through sharing. Build space into team meetings or standups to share messy experiments, quick wins and lessons learned. First, focus on celebrating curiosity. As the team gets more comfortable, start calling out more measurable business impacts.

When leaders create space for playful experimentation and managers encourage it at the team level, adoption stops being just another mandate and starts becoming part of how work gets done. Play your way forward and you’ll discover that the fastest path to serious results begins with having a little fun.