How Black & Veatch is democratizing AI expertise across its employee owners

Black & Veatch’s AI strategy demonstrates how thoughtful implementation can drive rapid, meaningful adoption across a large organization. Rather than deploying AI tools companywide and hoping for results, it’s built a cohort-based program that’s driven active and specific AI work usage to nearly half of its employee owners in just one year. The approach addresses the human factors that often derail AI initiatives by building champion networks, eliminating friction, and converting employee passion into tangible workplace and business benefits. By also combining partner-provided AI capabilities with proprietary tools trained on 110 years of engineering data, Black & Veatch is creating a multiplier effect that enables safety improvement, profitability, and increased resource capacity.

How is AI making its way into your business strategy?

We anchor our AI opportunities to three areas: safety, resourcing improvements, and profitable returns for our employee owners. With market demand increasing, particularly the power needs of data centers, we’re using AI to democratize knowledge across our engineers so Black & Veatch can deliver more strategic and accelerated solutions.

How are you embedding this strategy?

We’ve defined our AI capabilities continuum as foundational, differentiating, and enduring with a focus on four themes across gen AI, agentic AI, and MLOps.

The first theme is iterative innovation, which lowers the barriers to effective use of AI for all by driving adoption of Microsoft’s integrated gen AI capabilities.

Second is placing strategic bets on platforms for engineering, construction, HR, sales, and marketing while leveraging our strategic partners’ platform-specific generative and agentic AI strategies. We want the big providers to bring the models to us, so when an employee asks to use Claude, Perplexity AI, or ChatGPT, it’s fine to use a governed user experience like Microsoft 365 Copilot to bring those models to the user.

Third is disruptive innovation, which focuses less on provider AI and more on our own data. We’re rich in unstructured, natural language data from 110 years of documentation to engineer and deliver critical infrastructure. Our new BV ASK platform applies generative models against data, democratizing and improving functional expertise across engineering disciplines. So we’re leveraging AI and our data to create that multiplier effect of expertise.

Our fourth theme is in the MLOps space, turning our project sites into trillions of data points that train models to advance our work. We’re advancing plans to collect telemetry from job site equipment, employee wearables for safety monitoring, geofencing technology, and drones with computer vision to create multivariate models that can help predict the success and profitability of new projects. Rather than turn down good work, we’re creating an AI-driven feedback loop to increase our margins.

The human factor is the sticking point in driving AI adoption. How are you changing minds and behaviors?

I’ve seen CIOs give everybody Microsoft 365 Copilot and watch adoption hover at five to 10%. Instead, we started by using early successes with Copilot to build a champion network to influence more adoption. We picked a few powerful use cases, identified personas who’d benefit from those use cases, and created a cohort of early adopters. Then we found another set of use cases and created another cohort, so today, approximately 5,000 employee owners engage in AI cohorts at Black & Veatch, with 97% active usage of our core AI capabilities.

Curriculum within each cohort includes hands-on training and spark sessions to encourage growth and engagement within the community itself. In a few months, we expect to have about 7,500 of our employee owners through a program cohort, and 75% of our employee base actively using generative AI to support their work.

We ask our cohorts for three things: to actively incorporate AI into your daily job, participate enthusiastically in the cohort community, and be a net producer for the community versus a net consumer. The cohorts not only increase AI skill development, but drive a whole new level of collaboration across departments.

What’s your advice for CIOs who need to balance AI innovation and data security?

Just as access to the internet and social media platforms took some time to govern in corporations, AI is bringing similar consumer-driven urgency that we need to understand and use to drive efficiencies. People see that AI provides a tangible way to improve their personal lives, so when our teams come into our offices, they expect to have the same access to AI platforms to improve their work efficiency.

My first piece of advice is to educate your teams about the need for innovation and guardrails. We set up an AI governance committee and launched several campaigns coupled with cybersecurity awareness month to outline what we’re doing to deliver experiences using BV data, but within secure and safe guardrails. We also have a technology showcase every year where we educate ourselves on the why and how: why we need the guardrails and how to use the tools. Rather than restricting access, the approach we’re taking is to eliminate friction and frustration while establishing clear guidance and data security controls.

Also, establish a formal process to increase the overall AI acumen across the entire company. AI is different from the innovations of Metaverse and blockchain. People understand AI because it’s so tangible. They can use natural language to create interesting things, so the barriers to innovation are low.

And of course, use every opportunity to shift mindsets. When people express interest in AI tools, I ask them to send me an email with the answer to two questions: Why is this new capability interesting to you, and how will it allow you to do your job better? If the response is thoughtful, we pull them into an earlier cohort immediately. This removes potential frustration by converting their passion into a benefit of a cohort where they can apply their ideas.

What’s the key motivation behind this cohort program?

The most critical factor in AI-driven transformation, and in society, is the human element. Our program helps build a level playing field to enable all Black & Veatch creators to do what they do best — create! This new but foundational knowledge across the company allows us to pursue more advanced opportunities with AI. As collective knowledge increases, this opens even more to further advance AI enablement within engineering, and even out in the field. We’re beginning to see it already.