The New AI Digital DividesTM

Why Access Is No Longer Enough – Why Senior Leaders Must Build Capability Before the Gap Becomes Permanent

A Collaboration Evangelist Underwood Partners White Paper

 Craig Underwood | July  2026

I thought I understood the emerging divide around artificial intelligence. On one side were people and organizations using tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude; on the other were people who were not using them, could not use them, or were not permitted to use them.

Then I began building agents.

At first, I used AI much as many professionals do: to research questions, improve writing, brainstorm, and make sense of complicated information. With training and experience, I learned to prompt more deliberately: provide context, define the task, request a format, ask the model to critique itself, compare options, and refine the output. That alone substantially changed the quality of the work.

But the bigger change occurred when I began building custom agents that could perform multi-step research and analysis workflows. Suddenly, I was not simply asking AI for a better answer. I was delegating meaningful parts of a workstream. The challenge began to shift from producing output to supervising, evaluating, synthesizing, and acting on far more output than I could previously create myself.

That experience caused me to rethink the phrase digital divide.

The original digital divide concerned access: who had a computer, who had broadband, who could participate in the internet economy. Access to AI remains important. But it is no longer the only divide, or perhaps even the most consequential one for organizations. A widening set of capability divides now separates people and enterprises that cannot or will not use AI from those that use it casually, those that use it skillfully, those that build agents to execute work, and those that coordinate suites of agents across workflows.

My hypothesis is simple:

The next competitive, workforce, and social-equity challenge is not one AI divide. It is a ladder of AI capability divides – and the distance between the rungs is beginning to matter.

The research published over the past two years strongly supports this hypothesis, with one essential qualification: these five levels are not neat, mutually exclusive demographic categories. Organizations may occupy several at once. A hospital might prohibit public tools for patient information while deploying secure AI in administrative work. A firm may have Level 2 employees and Level 5 technology pilots at the same time. This is not a scorecard for judging people. It is a leadership framework for recognizing capability gaps before they harden into inequality and competitive disadvantage.

 

Figure 1. The Five-Level AI Capability Ladder.

The five divides

Level 1: Excluded, restricted, or refusing AI

This first category is more complex than “anti-AI.” Some people actively reject AI for philosophical, labor, environmental, artistic, or ethical reasons. Others want to learn but lack access, confidence, or opportunity. Still others work in organizations that appropriately restrict public AI tools because of privacy, confidentiality, regulated data, intellectual property, or safety concerns.

The distinction matters. A responsible restriction on feeding sensitive customer, patient, client, or proprietary information into a public model is not backward-looking. It is governance. But an organization that stops at prohibition – without providing approved alternatives, clear policies, and training in the responsible and productive use of AI – may unintentionally place employees at a capability disadvantage while also driving “shadow AI” use underground.

That is not a theoretical risk. The University of Melbourne and KPMG’s 2025 global study found that 70% of employees intentionally using AI at work accessed free, publicly available AI tools, while only two in five reported that their organization had a policy or guidance on generative AI use. Nearly half reported uploading sensitive company information or copyrighted material into public AI tools; strikingly, the behavior was most common among employees reporting that their organization had banned generative AI. Cisco’s 2026 Data and Privacy Benchmark Study, based on a September 2025 survey of more than 5,200 IT, technology and security professionals with data privacy responsibilities across 12 markets, adds an institutional view: 90% said AI had broadened the scope of their privacy programs, but only 12% described their AI governance committees as mature and proactive. The policy challenge is therefore not whether leaders should ignore risk. It is whether they can protect data while still enabling safe learning and useful experimentation.[1]

Figure 2. AI use is outrunning governance.

There is also a growing institutional access gap. The OECD reported in 2025 that AI adoption divides are forming along existing fault lines among places, sectors, and firms. Its analysis found that AI diffusion in 2023-24 was being driven more by leaders “escaping the pack” than by laggards catching up.[2] Put differently: as AI adoption accelerates, previous disadvantages in capital, skills, digital infrastructure, and organizational capacity may be magnified rather than erased.

 

 

Level 2: AI-assisted tasks – the “better Google and Grammarly” stage

This level captures the vast middle of current AI adoption: employees use AI to locate information, consolidate documents, generate ideas, summarize meetings, rewrite emails, or improve drafts. This is valuable. It can save time, reduce friction, and introduce people to a powerful technology.

But it is still mostly individual, task-level augmentation rather than a redesign of work.

Gallup’s April 2026 study of 23,717 employed U.S. adults found that half use AI in their role at least a few times a year, while 28% use it at least a few times a week and 13% use it daily.[3] A prior Gallup analysis found that common uses were precisely the kinds of activities associated with Level 2: consolidating information, generating ideas, learning new things, and using chatbots or writing/editing tools.[4]

This is a genuine productivity opportunity. It is also a potential trap for leaders who confuse widespread experimentation with organizational transformation. In the same 2026 Gallup study, 65% of employees in organizations implementing AI said it had improved their productivity and efficiency; yet only about one in ten strongly agreed that AI had transformed how work gets done in their organization.[5]

Figure 3. AI adoption is broad; deep use is not.

The distinction is crucial. If employees become slightly faster at emails, summaries, and brainstorming while the organization continues operating through the same slow handoffs, redundant meetings, outdated processes, disconnected systems, and approval bottlenecks, the organization has captured convenience – not transformation.

Level 3: AI-literate knowledge work

At Level 3, AI is no longer simply a search box or writing assistant. People have learned enough to work with it deliberately. They can frame a problem, supply context and source material, specify the desired deliverable, challenge weak outputs, verify claims, ask for alternatives, iterate toward a stronger result, and understand when not to rely on the model.

I use the phrase AI-literate knowledge work intentionally. Prompt engineering matters, but this level is broader than clever prompts. It includes judgment, verification, data protection, task selection, critical thinking, and the discipline to keep humans accountable for important decisions.

Research suggests this divide is already material. Boston Consulting Group’s 2025 global AI at Work survey found that only 36% of employees felt properly trained in the skills needed for AI transformation and only 25% of frontline employees reported receiving sufficient support from leadership on how and when to use AI. Yet regular AI use was closely associated with training intensity: 18% among employees receiving no training, 63% among those receiving one to five hours, 82% among those receiving five to ten hours, and 89% among those receiving more than ten hours.[6]

Figure 4. Training and leadership support lag behind adoption.

This is where the AI divide becomes a leadership issue. When executives offer a tool but do not provide training, permission boundaries, safe data practices, coaching, example workflows of AI prompts/ instructions that worked – and extremely important, those that didn’t work – or time to practice, they create an environment in which the confident and self-directed advance while others remain behind. In effect, they outsource capability building to personal curiosity, spare time, and professional privilege.

The stakes are economic as well. PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer, drawing on nearly one billion job advertisements across six continents, found a 56% wage premium for jobs requiring AI skills compared with similar jobs without those skills. It also found that skills are changing 66% faster in AI-exposed jobs than in other jobs, and that industries more exposed to AI experienced three times greater growth in revenue per employee.[7] This does not prove that prompting alone produces higher wages or productivity. It does strongly suggest that the capacity to work effectively with AI is becoming economically valuable – and rapidly so.

Importantly, AI literacy can sometimes narrow existing skill gaps rather than worsen them. A peer-reviewed 2025 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics examined 5,172 customer support agents using an AI conversational assistant. Access to AI increased productivity by 15% on average, with the largest gains accruing to less experienced and less skilled workers; novice workers with AI reached performance levels comparable to far more experienced workers without it.[8] This is a hopeful finding: appropriately deployed AI can democratize expertise. But it also underlines the moral and organizational consequence of denying some workers the training and tools that allow them to benefit.

Level 4: Agent-enabled workflows

At Level 4, the user is not simply conversing with AI. The user creates or deploys an agent that can conduct a multi-step task: search defined sources, analyze data, prepare a first draft, compare options, produce a report, monitor a condition, or support a repeatable operational workflow.

This is the divide I only fully appreciated after beginning to build custom agents myself. There is a dramatic difference between asking an AI system, “What companies might sponsor this nonprofit event?” and designing an agentic workflow that methodically reviews industry lists, identifies relevant companies, researches corporate giving, checks foundation tax filings, ranks prospects, records findings, and produces a briefing for human review. The human remains accountable. But the scale and speed of possible work changes materially.

Early organizational examples illustrate this shift.

Moderna: After providing employees access to ChatGPT Enterprise, Moderna reported that within two months it had 750 custom GPTs across the company; 40% of weekly active users had created a GPT; and the average user conducted 120 ChatGPT Enterprise conversations per week. One pilot, Dose ID, was designed to review and analyze clinical data and support clinical study teams’ dose-selection analysis while preserving human judgment and review.[9] Moderna’s own description emphasizes that embedding AI requires not just technology but an “AI-focused culture” and on-the-job training.[10]

Morgan Stanley: In 2024, Morgan Stanley Research announced AskResearchGPT, an AI-powered capability intended to help client-facing teams find and synthesize insights from the firm’s research. The company described it as part of a growing suite that included AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant and AI @ Morgan Stanley Debrief for wealth-management advisors and staff.[11] This is not an employee polishing an email. It is a firm creating controlled, domain-grounded AI capability embedded in professional work.

Small and midsized organizations: The opportunity is not reserved for global enterprises. In a representative survey of more than 5,000 small and medium-sized enterprises across seven OECD countries, 31% reported using generative AI. Among SME users, 65% said it had improved employee performance, 39% of those experiencing a skills gap said it helped compensate for that gap, and one-third reported reduced workload. Yet a third or fewer were taking measures to train staff, set internal guidance, or research legal and regulatory issues.[12] This combination – useful technology without commensurate capability building – is precisely how a new divide can widen.

Level 5: AI-orchestrated organizations

At the fifth level, organizations coordinate multiple agents, workflows, tools, data sources, and human decision makers. Humans set objectives, define permissions, supervise exceptions, evaluate results, protect values, and bear accountability. Agents may research, draft, schedule, classify, analyze, retrieve, monitor, escalate, or execute bounded tasks across a connected process.

This is still emerging. Leaders should be wary of hype and “agentwashing,” in which an ordinary chatbot is described as an autonomous agent. Yet the direction of travel is increasingly visible.

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, based on survey data from 31,000 workers across 31 countries as well as labor-market and productivity signals, described an evolution from AI as assistant, to agents as “digital colleagues,” to humans directing agents that run whole workflows. It found that 81% of leaders expected agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their AI 

strategy within 12 to 18 months, and 46% said their companies were already using agents to fully automate workflows or processes.[13]

The report also reveals an agentic gap between leaders and employees. Sixty-seven percent of leaders reported familiarity with agents, compared with 40% of employees. Sixty-nine percent of leaders used AI regularly, compared with 45% of employees. And 36% of leaders expected to manage agents in their jobs, compared with 21% of employees. Most strikingly, 42% of leaders expected their teams to be building multi-agent systems to automate complex tasks within five years.[14]

 

 

 

Figure 5. The frontier is moving from use to orchestration.

Technology suppliers are now making this capability easier to deploy. Microsoft announced multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio in 2025, enabling agents to delegate tasks and share results across complex workflows.[15] Anthropic described how its own multi-agent research system uses a lead agent to coordinate parallel subagents, reporting that the multi-agent configuration outperformed a single-agent configuration by 90.2% on its internal research evaluation for breadth-first research tasks.[16] Gartner forecast in August 2025 that task-specific AI agents would be integrated into 40% of enterprise applications by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025; Gartner also explicitly warned against confusing AI assistants with agents.[17]

None of these findings means every organization should rush to automate every process. Agentic systems introduce new risks: security exposures, unreliable actions, poor source selection, errors at scale, loss of accountability, employee anxiety, and the possibility that leaders automate activity without improving outcomes. They require more governance, not less.

But they do reinforce the central hypothesis: organizations capable of designing, supervising, and safely coordinating agents may operate in a fundamentally different productivity environment from organizations still debating whether employees may use an AI writing assistant.

Why this is not merely a technology story

The new AI divides matter for at least three reasons.

1. They are a competitive and economic issue

The difference between Level 2 and Level 4 is not simply efficiency. It is leverage. A professional using AI to revise an email may save minutes. A professional managing a well-designed research agent may expand the number of opportunities evaluated, accelerate decisions, and produce capabilities that previously required a team or an outsourced engagement.

The evidence is not yet sufficient to calculate an exact productivity premium for each rung of this ladder. Indeed, Gallup’s research properly cautions that individual task gains have not yet translated into widespread transformation of organizational work. But that is precisely the point: organizations capable of redesigning workflows may separate themselves from organizations that never move beyond incidental personal usage.

2. They are a workforce development issue

A digital divide becomes socially consequential when the people most in need of capability are least likely to receive it. Frontline employees, workers in smaller organizations, professionals outside technology and finance, and communities with fewer learning resources risk becoming users of yesterday’s workflows while better-supported peers learn to direct AI-powered work.

I believe leaders have the responsibility – some would say the moral imperative – to help employees learn how to use AI responsibly and efficiently and to move toward higher-value work involving judgment, relationships, creativity, influence and accountability.  This is especially important for nonprofit leaders of work-force development and college access/ success organizations, and those whose missions include preparing those they serve for jobs of the future.  Imagine the different impression a young entry-level job or internship applicant would leave on a prospective employer when answering the question “Do you use AI?” between:

“[My training organization] has provided responsible AI literacy training and prompt engineering to all of its students.”

And

“I don’t use AI much at all.” Or even worse, “We are prohibited from using AI.”

The optimistic scenario is that AI distributes expertise: a new employee learns faster; a small nonprofit conducts analysis it could not afford; a local business competes more effectively; a person without elite credentials gains a powerful intellectual assistant. The darker scenario is that access to secure tools, training, agents, and integrated systems concentrates among already advantaged firms and professionals.

Leaders help determine which scenario occurs.

3. They are a leadership and governance issue

A ban is not a strategy. A license is not a strategy. A prompting webinar is not a strategy. An agent pilot is not a strategy.

An AI capability strategy requires leaders to answer hard questions: Which tools are approved? What data may be used? Which tasks should remain human-only? Which employees are receiving training? Who has access to agent-building capability? How are outputs checked? How are actions authorized, logged, and audited? What new measures of quality, equity, capacity, and risk will we use? Where are humans indispensable because judgment, trust, care, moral responsibility, or public legitimacy matter?

The ladder is therefore not a call to put every worker and task at Level 5. The appropriate level depends on the work. It is a call for every senior leader to understand the ladder, make intentional decisions, and ensure that safe opportunity is not limited to a small group of early adopters.

A practical leadership agenda: build bridges across all five divides

Leaders do not need perfect answers before they begin. They do need to stop treating AI adoption as a binary choice. A practical agenda might include seven moves:

  1. Map where your organization actually sits on the ladder. Survey employees not simply on whether they use AI, but how: prohibited or uncertain; occasional task assistance; trained and evaluated use; custom agents; coordinated workflows. Segment results by role, function, seniority, location, and frontline status.
  2. Separate protective restrictions from capability exclusion. Define confidential and regulated data boundaries clearly. Offer secure approved tools where feasible. Do not force employees into the false choice between falling behind and violating unclear policies.
  3. Make AI literacy a universal workplace capability. Provide hands-on training in useful tasks, prompt design, output evaluation, sourcing, privacy, bias, and escalation. BCG’s findings imply that one short introduction is unlikely to be sufficient: sustained instruction and coaching correlate far more strongly with regular use.
  4. Create role-specific use cases. Senior leaders should not merely announce that AI is available. Managers must help employees see how it improves their real work: fundraising research, customer support, grant writing, sales preparation, program reporting, operations, procurement, financial analysis, stakeholder communications, or policy research. And – of critical importance – maintain and widely publicize an AI Prompt/ Instructions Library to catalogue not only what has worked well, but also those that didn’t work.
  5. Democratize safe agent-building. Identify employees in different functions who can build and test bounded agents with clear human review. Give smaller units and mission-driven organizations access to methods that are not limited to large technology departments.
  6. Govern orchestration before it scales. As agents begin to interact with systems and one another, they should require permissions, monitoring, auditable source trails, approval checkpoints, performance testing, red-team reviews (that deliberately probe for failures and unintended consequences before deployment), and clear human accountability. The higher the ladder, the higher the governance requirement.
  7. Measure opportunity as well as productivity. Ask not merely whether AI reduces costs, but whether employees are learning, whether frontline staff have comparable access, whether smaller teams can deliver higher-impact work, and whether new capability is being broadly shared.

The divide we can still choose to prevent

The most important question is not whether AI will be adopted. It already is. Stanford’s 2025 AI Index reported that 78% of surveyed organizations used AI in 2024, up from 55% a year earlier.[18] The U.S. Census Bureau reported in May 2026 that 17% to 20% of U.S. businesses had used AI in at least one business function during the preceding two weeks, with much higher rates among larger firms and in information and finance.[19] Different measurements produce different percentages, but the direction is unmistakable: AI is diffusing rapidly and unevenly.

The question is whether leaders will allow that unevenness to become a durable capability divide.

The first digital divide taught us that providing devices or internet access was necessary but not sufficient. People also needed affordability, training, support, relevant applications, trust, and the opportunity to convert access into improved lives.

The same is true now – with higher stakes and a faster clock.

Organizations that merely allow AI may trail those that teach people to use it well. Organizations that teach prompting may trail those that design agents to perform real work. Organizations experimenting with one agent may trail those that learn to orchestrate multiple agents responsibly across entire workflows. And organizations that restrict AI without building secure alternatives may unintentionally leave employees and communities unable to participate in the next stage of work.

This is why the new AI digital divide belongs on every senior leader’s agenda. It is simultaneously an economic question, a workforce question, a social-equity question, and a governance question.

The divide is not inevitable. But the ladder is already built.

Selected Bibliography

Anthropic. “How We Built Our Multi-Agent Research System.” June 13, 2025.

Boston Consulting Group. AI at Work: Momentum Builds, but Gaps Remain. June 2025.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond. “Generative AI at Work.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 140, no. 2 (May 2025): 889-942.

Cisco. Cisco 2026 Data and Privacy Benchmark Study. 2026.

Gillespie, Nicole, Steve Lockey, Tim Ward, Alex Macdade, and Greta Hassed. Trust, Attitudes and Use of Artificial Intelligence: A Global Study 2025. University of Melbourne and KPMG International, 2025.

Gallup. Kemp, Andy. “AI Use at Work Rises.” December 15, 2025.

Gallup. Kemp, Andy. “Rising AI Adoption Spurs Workforce Changes.” April 13, 2026.

Gartner. “Gartner Predicts 40% of Enterprise Apps Will Feature Task-Specific AI Agents by 2026, Up from Less Than 5% in 2025.” August 26, 2025; updated September 5, 2025.

Kergroach, Sandrine, and Julien Héritier. Emerging Divides in the Transition to Artificial Intelligence. OECD Regional Development Papers No. 147. OECD Publishing, 2025.

Microsoft. 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born. April 23, 2025.

Microsoft. “What’s New in Copilot Studio: May 2025.” June 4, 2025.

Moderna. “Collaboration with OpenAI: Transforming the Way We Work and Innovate Through AI.” April 24, 2024.

Morgan Stanley. “Morgan Stanley Research Announces AskResearchGPT.” October 23, 2024.

OECD. Generative AI and the SME Workforce. November 2025.

OpenAI. “Moderna: Pioneering the Future of Medicine with ChatGPT Enterprise.” 2024.

PwC. The Fearless Future: 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer. June 3, 2025.

Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. 2025 AI Index Report. 2025.

U.S. Census Bureau. “AI Use at U.S. Businesses.” May 2026.

[1] Nicole Gillespie et al., Trust, Attitudes and Use of Artificial Intelligence: A Global Study 2025 (University of Melbourne and KPMG International, 2025), 70-76; Cisco, Cisco 2026 Data and Privacy Benchmark Study (2026), 3-4, 7. The Cisco survey was conducted in September 2025 among more than 5,200 IT, technology and security professionals with data privacy responsibilities across 12 markets.

[2] Sandrine Kergroach and Julien Héritier, Emerging Divides in the Transition to Artificial Intelligence, OECD Regional Development Papers No. 147, 2025.

[3] Andy Kemp, Rising AI Adoption Spurs Workforce Changes, Gallup, April 13, 2026. Based on a February 4-19, 2026 Gallup survey of 23,717 employed U.S. adults.

[4] Andy Kemp, AI Use at Work Rises, Gallup, December 15, 2025. Common uses were reported in Gallup’s Q2 2025 measurement and described in the December article.

[5] Andy Kemp, Rising AI Adoption Spurs Workforce Changes, Gallup, April 13, 2026. Based on a February 4-19, 2026 Gallup survey of 23,717 employed U.S. adults.

[6] Boston Consulting Group, AI at Work: Momentum Builds, but Gaps Remain, June 2025. Global survey of 10,635 employees; frontline analysis includes 3,537 employees.

[7] PwC, The Fearless Future: 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer, June 3, 2025. PwC analyzed close to one billion job ads across six continents.

[8] Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond, “Generative AI at Work,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 140, no. 2 (May 2025): 889-942.

[9] OpenAI, Moderna: Pioneering the Future of Medicine with ChatGPT Enterprise, 2024; the case study reports Moderna’s adoption figures and describes the Dose ID pilot.

[10] Moderna, Collaboration with OpenAI: Transforming the Way We Work and Innovate Through AI, April 24, 2024.

[11] Morgan Stanley, Morgan Stanley Research Announces AskResearchGPT, October 23, 2024.

[12] OECD, Generative AI and the SME Workforce, November 2025. Representative 2024 survey of more than 5,000 SMEs in Austria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom.

[13] Microsoft, 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born, April 23, 2025. The report states that it draws on survey data from 31,000 workers across 31 countries, LinkedIn labor-market trends, and Microsoft 365 productivity signals.

[14] Microsoft, 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born, April 23, 2025. The report states that it draws on survey data from 31,000 workers across 31 countries, LinkedIn labor-market trends, and Microsoft 365 productivity signals.

[15] Microsoft, What’s New in Copilot Studio: May 2025, June 4, 2025.

[16] Anthropic, How We Built Our Multi-Agent Research System, June 13, 2025. The reported performance comparison is an internal evaluation and should not be generalized to every multi-agent use case.

[17] Gartner, Gartner Predicts 40% of Enterprise Apps Will Feature Task-Specific AI Agents by 2026, Up from Less Than 5% in 2025, August 26, 2025, updated September 5, 2025.

[18] Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, 2025 AI Index Report, 2025. Its organizational use statistic draws on a survey measure and should not be compared directly with the Census measure of recent U.S. business-function use.

[19] U.S. Census Bureau, AI Use at U.S. Businesses, May 2026, reporting Business Trends and Outlook Survey data collected December 14, 2025 through May 3, 2026.

by Craig Underwood | June 22, 2026

Net / Summary / Abstract
Massachusetts now has one clearly universal free AI training offer for all residents: the Massachusetts AI Hub + Grow with Google partnership, which provides no-cost access through December 31, 2027 to Google AI and career certificate programs. The clearest free AI tool-access benefit is narrower but still meaningful: learners who enroll in the Google AI Professional Certificate receive three months of no-cost access to Google AI Pro. Beyond that resident-facing offer, the Healey administration has built a broader AI support ecosystem including educator pilots, high school AI programming, state-employee AI tools and training, AI compute resources, data commons work, applied AI grants, and startup supports. The practical takeaway for clients is simple: residents and organizations should use the Google training now, while tracking which other Massachusetts initiatives are universal, targeted, or limited-capacity.

CLICK HERE TO GO REGISTER FOR FREE GOOGLE AI AND OTHER TRAINING

Executive Summary

Massachusetts now has one major statewide free AI training offer for all residents: the Massachusetts AI Hub + Grow with Google partnership, announced by Governor Maura Healey on February 26, 2026. It gives Massachusetts residents no-cost access, through December 31, 2027, to Google AI and career certificate programs, including the Google AI Professional Certificate, Google AI Essentials, Google Agile Essentials, and Google Career Certificates such as Data Analytics, IT Support, and Project Management.[1]

The most concrete free AI tool access currently available to the general public through this initiative is attached to the Google AI Professional Certificate: each learner who enrolls in that AI certificate receives three months of no-cost access to Google AI Pro.[2]

Beyond that resident-facing benefit, Massachusetts has built a broader AI support ecosystem through the Massachusetts AI Hub, launched in December 2024 after the Massachusetts AI Strategic Task Force and supported by the Mass Leads Act. The Hub’s mission is to connect, accelerate, and scale AI initiatives that advance innovation, economic growth, workforce development, and public good across Massachusetts.[3]

The practical bottom line: for ordinary Massachusetts residents, the free Google training partnership is the clear ‘go do this now’ opportunity. For educators, public employees, students, startups, nonprofits, universities, and employers, there are additional targeted opportunities, but eligibility and access vary.

Figure 1. Massachusetts AI Investment & Support Timeline

 

1. What Is Available to All Massachusetts Residents?

CLICK HERE TO GO REGISTER FOR FREE GOOGLE AI AND OTHER TRAINING

A. Grow with Google + Massachusetts AI Hub: free AI and career training

The most direct statewide resident benefit is the Grow with Google partnership, administered through the Massachusetts AI Hub. The state announcement says the partnership offers all Massachusetts residents access to artificial intelligence and career certificate training programs at no cost through Grow with Google.[1]

The MA AI Hub’s Grow with Google page says Massachusetts residents receive no-cost access until December 31, 2027, to the Google AI Professional Certificate, Google AI Essentials, Google Agile Essentials, and Google Career Certificates, including examples such as Data Analytics, IT Support, and Project Management.[1]

Programs listed by the Massachusetts AI Hub

Program What it provides Best fit
Google AI Professional Certificate Multi-course AI fluency certificate with hands-on activities and portfolio-building; includes three months of Google AI Pro for enrollees. Workers, students, jobseekers, small-business owners, executives, nonprofit staff
Google AI Essentials Introductory generative AI fundamentals, productivity, prompting, responsible use, and staying current. Beginners and busy professionals
Google Agile Essentials Agile project-management basics. Managers, team leads, project coordinators
Google Career Certificates Examples listed by MA AI Hub include Data Analytics, IT Support, and Project Management. Jobseekers, career changers, incumbent workers

The most important AI-tool access detail

The Google AI Professional Certificate is not just a training program. The MA AI Hub page states that every learner who enrolls in the AI Certificate also receives three months of no-cost access to Google AI Pro. That appears to be the most concrete free AI tool access currently available to all Massachusetts residents under the Healey-Google partnership.[2]

What the Google AI Professional Certificate covers

The MA AI Hub describes the Google AI Professional Certificate as going beyond the basics with 20+ hands-on activities designed to build AI fluency. [4]

What Google AI Essentials covers

Google AI Essentials appears to be the better starting point for residents who want a shorter, less technical introduction. The MA AI Hub page lists five modules: Intro to AI; Maximize Productivity With AI Tools; Discover the Art of Prompting; Use AI Responsibly; and Stay Ahead of the AI Curve.[5]

This is likely the best starting point for residents who are not yet sure they want a full certificate.

How residents access it

The MA AI Hub page describes a four-step process: residents express interest through a short form, begin the chosen online course at their own pace, complete the program and earn a Google credential, and may share their success story.[1]

2. What Is Available by Audience Segment?

Figure 2. Who Gets What? Massachusetts AI Access by Audience

A. Individual Massachusetts residents

Most relevant benefit: no-cost Grow with Google training through the MA AI Hub. This includes AI training and career certificates through December 31, 2027, plus three months of Google AI Pro for those enrolling in the Google AI Professional Certificate.[1][2]

Best starting point: Google AI Essentials for AI beginners; Google AI Professional Certificate for people who want deeper fluency, a credential, portfolio-style activities, and the included three months of Google AI Pro.

B. Students

Students can use the statewide Google training if they are Massachusetts residents. The partnership serves students, employees, and small-business owners across the Commonwealth.[1]

There is also a targeted Massachusetts High School Summer Career Academy in AI, launched in summer 2025 as a pilot involving 50 high school students from eight sending districts, with priority for Gateway City schools or regional consortia. Students in grades 9-12 learned AI fundamentals, how AI is used in generative AI, health, autonomous vehicles, and business decisions, and also worked with Python, AI ethics, bias, group projects, mentorship, career workshops, and a showcase event.[6]

C. Educators and schools

The most specific educator initiative is Future Ready: AI in the Classroom, a professional-development pilot launched in June 2025 in partnership with Project Lead The Way. The state made a $135,000 investment supporting teachers in 45 classrooms and it is estimated it would reach more than 1,600 students.[7]

Future Ready is a 50-hour professional-development pilot for high school STEM educators, launched with the Massachusetts STEM Advisory Council and Project Lead The Way. It is described as the first-in-the-nation pilot of PLTW’s AI curriculum and is intended to help educators bring AI into STEM classrooms responsibly and practically.[8]

D. Nonprofits

Nonprofit staff who are Massachusetts residents can use the no-cost Grow with Google resident training.[1]

The MA AI Hub’s Additional AI Training Resources page points nonprofits toward Microsoft AI training pathways, where AI-powered solutions can help nonprofits transform operations, improve agility, increase transparency, and improve measurable outcomes.[10]

The AI Hub’s infrastructure and ecosystem programs are also relevant to nonprofit institutions involved in research, education, workforce development, public-interest technology, or applied AI projects. For example, the Artificial Intelligence Compute Resources program dedicates at least 40% of compute time will be dedicated to startups, entrepreneurs, and partner institutions including non-member colleges and nonprofits statewide.[11]

E. Small businesses and employers

The Google partnership is designed to provide every resident and small business with AI and tech skills needed to succeed in the digital economy.[1]

For small businesses, one of the most useful immediate pathways is for owners and staff to enroll in Google AI Essentials or the Google AI Professional Certificate; use the three months of Google AI Pro included with AI Professional Certificate enrollment; and then apply AI to productivity, customer communications, research, content creation, data analysis, planning, and lightweight app-building.[1][2]

For AI startups and AI-enabled companies, the AI Hub’s compute resources, applied AI grants, startup accelerator ecosystem, and job board support these ventures. The Open Accelerator is a Boston initiative to empower Massachusetts AI founders with networks, knowledge, skills, workspace, mentorship, GPU access, hackathons, and community.[12]

F. Public-sector workers

Massachusetts is also deploying AI inside state government. On February 13, 2026, Governor Healey announced a ChatGPT-powered AI Assistant for the state workforce. The executive branch includes nearly 40,000 employees.  The tool is intended to provide a safe, secure environment that protects state data.[13]

WBUR reported that the ChatGPT-powered assistant would be phased in across the almost 40,000-employee executive branch, starting with the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security, and that the state was also rolling out optional training programs for employees using the assistant.[14]

Separately, EOTSS formed a partnership with InnovateUS to deliver generative AI training for its employees. The  training is available to all TSS staff, free of charge, and consists of five modules.[15]

3. Broader AI Infrastructure and Innovation Supports

Figure 3. Massachusetts AI Support Flywheel

A. Massachusetts AI Hub

The MA AI Hub was launched in 2024 as a key recommendation of the Massachusetts AI Strategic Task Force. Its mission is to connect, accelerate and scale AI initiatives that advance innovation, economic growth, workforce development, and public good across Massachusetts.[3]

The AI Hub’s program areas include Applied AI Models Innovation Challenge, Artificial Intelligence Compute Resources, Data Commons Collaborative, Sector Spark, The Open Accelerator, Grow with Google, Additional AI Training Resources, Future Ready, and Summer Career Academy in AI.[16]

B. Artificial Intelligence Compute Resources

In May 2025, Governor Healey announced a $31 million state grant to expand access to sustainable high-performance computing for AI innovation through the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke.[17]

The MA AI Hub describes the Artificial Intelligence Compute Resources project as a $31 million grant to develop AICR at MGHPCC, operated by a consortium including Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, UMass, and Yale. The project is intended to make high-performance GPU and compute infrastructure more accessible to universities, startups, businesses, and communities across Massachusetts and beyond. The AICR cluster is the first phase of a planned $120 million public-private investment, with at least 40% of compute time dedicated to startups, entrepreneurs, and partner institutions including non-member colleges and nonprofits statewide.[11]

C. Data Commons Collaborative

The MA AI Hub’s Data Commons Collaborative is a flagship initiative to unlock responsibly governed, high-quality shared data to fuel AI innovation. Initial focus sectors include life sciences, health care, robotics, financial services, advanced manufacturing, climate tech, and education.[18]

D. Applied AI Models Innovation Challenge

In October 2025, the Healey-Driscoll Administration and MassTech announced $2,882,219 for seven projects through the Massachusetts AI Models Innovation Challenge. The program supports domain-specific AI model projects in sectors including health care, climate resiliency, robotics, and advanced manufacturing, and the funded projects brought more than $950,000 in matching funds from industry and academic partners.[19]

The Challenge had launched in February 2025 with the goal of positioning Massachusetts as a leader in applied AI innovation, emphasizing domain-specific models that are more energy-efficient and easier to commercialize than generalized AI systems.[19]

E. The Open Accelerator

The Open Accelerator is a Boston initiative involving the MA AI Hub, Red Hat, and IBM Ventures. It is designed to empower Massachusetts AI founders with networks, knowledge, skills, mentorship, workspace, GPU access, hackathons, and community.[12]

4. Practical Recommendations

CLICK HERE TO GO REGISTER FOR FREE GOOGLE AI AND OTHER TRAINING

For an individual resident

Start with Google AI Essentials if you are new to AI. It is structured, practical, and includes prompting and responsible use. Move to the Google AI Professional Certificate if you want deeper fluency, a credential, portfolio-style activities, and the included three months of Google AI Pro.[1][2]

For a nonprofit leader

Have all senior staff and program staff complete Google AI Essentials, then identify a smaller group to complete the Google AI Professional Certificate. Use the MA AI Hub’s additional resources page to explore Microsoft and Anthropic learning paths for nonprofits.[10]

For a school or youth-serving organization

Use Google AI Essentials as a baseline for adult staff, track DESE guidance and Future Ready expansions, and consider adapting the High School Summer Career Academy model into a local pilot. DESE’s December 2024 recommendations are especially useful for building safe-use policies, educator training, privacy guardrails, and AI literacy standards.[6][7][9]

For small businesses

Use the Google AI Professional Certificate as a practical business-productivity training program. The course sequence covers planning, research, writing, content creation, data analysis, and app-building, all of which are directly relevant to small-business operations.[4]

For public-sector workers

State executive-branch employees should watch for agency rollout of the ChatGPT-powered AI Assistant and associated training. Public servants outside that rollout can also explore InnovateUS’s public-sector AI courses, which are free and oriented toward responsible use of generative AI in government.[13][15]

Endnotes

[1] Governor Healey and Google announced on February 26, 2026 that all Massachusetts residents would have access to AI and career certificate training programs at no cost through Grow with Google; the MA AI Hub identifies the specific programs and says no-cost access runs through December 31, 2027. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘Governor Healey and Google Announce New Statewide Partnership to Provide Free AI Training to Residents’; MA AI Hub, ‘Grow with Google.’

[2] The MA AI Hub Grow with Google page states that learners who enroll in the Google AI Professional Certificate receive three months of no-cost access to Google AI Pro. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘Grow with Google.’

[3] The Massachusetts AI Hub describes its mission as connecting, accelerating, and scaling AI initiatives for innovation, economic growth, workforce development, and public good. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘About MA AI Hub.’

[4] The MA AI Hub states that the Google AI Professional Certificate includes 20+ hands-on activities and courses in AI fundamentals, brainstorming and planning, research and insights, writing and communicating, content creation, data analysis, and app-building. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘Grow with Google.’

[5] The MA AI Hub states that Google AI Essentials includes modules on AI basics, productivity with AI tools, prompting, responsible AI, and staying ahead of AI developments. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘Grow with Google.’

[6] The Summer Career Academy in AI page states that the summer 2025 pilot engaged 50 high school students from eight districts and included AI fundamentals, Python, ethics and bias, career workshops, mentorship, and group projects. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘MA High School Summer Career Academy in AI.’

[7] The Future Ready initiative was launched in June 2025 as a $135,000 professional-development pilot in partnership with Project Lead The Way, supporting teachers in 45 classrooms and estimated to reach more than 1,600 students. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘Healey-Driscoll Administration Launches Future Ready: AI in the Classroom for Educators.’

[8] The MA AI Hub describes Future Ready as a 50-hour professional-development pilot for high school STEM educators launched with the Massachusetts STEM Advisory Council and Project Lead The Way. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘Future Ready.’

[9] DESE’s December 2024 AI recommendations call for AI literacy resources, curated AI tools, enterprise-level AI tools, no-cost professional learning for educators, student data privacy training, sample district policies, integration into educator preparation, and incorporation of AI literacy into Massachusetts curriculum frameworks. Source: Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, ‘Integrating Artificial Intelligence: Massachusetts AI Task Force Recommendations.’

[10] The MA AI Hub’s Additional AI Training Resources page includes Microsoft and Anthropic resources and a nonprofit-focused Microsoft AI training pathway. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘Additional AI Training Resources.’

[11] The Artificial Intelligence Compute Resources page states the AICR project is a $31 million grant at MGHPCC, the first phase of a planned $120 million public-private investment, and that at least 40% of compute time will be dedicated to startups, entrepreneurs, and partner institutions including non-member colleges and nonprofits statewide. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘Artificial Intelligence Compute Resources.’

[12] The Open Accelerator describes itself as a Boston initiative involving MA AI Hub, Red Hat, and IBM Ventures to support Massachusetts AI founders with mentorship, GPU access, hackathons, and community. Source: The Open Accelerator website.

[13] The February 2026 state announcement describes a ChatGPT-powered AI Assistant for the executive branch, covering nearly 40,000 state employees in a phased rollout. Source: Mass.gov, ‘Governor Healey Announces Massachusetts to Become First State to Deploy ChatGPT Across Executive Branch.’

[14] WBUR reported that the ChatGPT-powered assistant would be phased in across the nearly 40,000-employee executive branch and that optional training programs would be rolled out for employees using the assistant. Source: WBUR, ‘Massachusetts launching ChatGPT assistant across executive branch.’

[15] EOTSS announced a November 2025 partnership with InnovateUS to provide generative AI training to Technology Services and Security staff. Source: Mass.gov, ‘EOTSS Announces Workforce Training Partnership with InnovateUS.’

[16] The MA AI Hub homepage lists program areas including Grow with Google, Applied AI Models Innovation Challenge, Additional AI Training Resources, Future Ready, and other AI Hub initiatives. Source: MA AI Hub homepage.

[17] The May 2025 MA AI Hub update announced a $31 million state grant for AI compute resources, the hiring of the AI Hub’s first director, and exploration of an IBM/Red Hat startup accelerator. Source: MassTech, ‘Governor Healey Advances State’s AI Leadership with Major Investments in Massachusetts AI Hub.’

[18] The MA AI Hub’s Data Commons Collaborative is intended to unlock responsibly governed, high-quality shared data to fuel AI innovation in sectors including life sciences, health care, robotics, financial services, advanced manufacturing, climate tech, and education. Source: MA AI Hub, ‘Data Commons Collaborative.’

[19] The October 2025 AI Models Innovation Challenge awards totaled $2,882,219 for seven projects, with more than $950,000 in matching funds. Source: MassTech, ‘Healey-Driscoll Administration Announces $2.9 Million in Awards through Massachusetts AI Hub.’

Bibliography / Sources Researched

Accessed June 16, 2026. Sources listed here include those cited directly and related sources reviewed for context.

  1. Massachusetts AI Hub – Grow with Google. https://aihub.masstech.org/google-certificates Primary source for no-cost resident access, covered programs, Dec. 31, 2027 end date, course descriptions, and Google AI Pro access.
  2. MA AI Hub – Governor Healey and Google Announce New Statewide Partnership to Provide Free AI Training to Residents. https://aihub.masstech.org/news/governor-healey-and-google-announce-new-statewide-partnership-provide-free-ai-training Primary source for the February 26, 2026 announcement.
  3. Massachusetts AI Hub – About MA AI Hub. https://aihub.masstech.org/about-ma-ai-hub Source for mission and launch context.
  4. MassTech – Governor Healey Advances State’s AI Leadership with Major Investments in Massachusetts AI Hub. https://masstech.org/news/governor-healey-advances-states-ai-leadership-major-investments-massachusetts-ai-hub Source for $31 million compute grant, AI Hub director, and IBM/Red Hat accelerator exploration.
  5. Massachusetts AI Hub – Artificial Intelligence Compute Resources. https://aihub.masstech.org/artificial-intelligence-compute-resources Source for AICR, MGHPCC partnership, 40% compute allocation, and planned $120 million public-private investment.
  6. Massachusetts AI Hub – Additional AI Training Resources. https://aihub.masstech.org/additional-ai-training-resources Source for Microsoft AI Skills Navigator and Anthropic Academy references.
  7. Massachusetts AI Hub – Future Ready. https://aihub.masstech.org/future-ready Source for Future Ready pilot details.
  8. MA AI Hub – Healey-Driscoll Administration Launches Future Ready: AI in the Classroom for Educators. https://aihub.masstech.org/news/healey-driscoll-administration-launches-future-ready-ai-classroom-educators Source for $135,000 investment, 45 classrooms, and estimated 1,600 students.
  9. Massachusetts AI Hub – MA High School Summer Career Academy in AI. https://aihub.masstech.org/ma-high-school-summer-career-academy-ai Source for the summer 2025 pilot.
  10. Massachusetts AI Hub – Data Commons Collaborative. https://aihub.masstech.org/data-commons-collaborative Source for data-access strategy and priority sectors.
  11. MassTech – Healey-Driscoll Administration Announces $2.9 Million in Awards through Massachusetts AI Hub. https://masstech.org/news/healey-driscoll-administration-announces-29-million-awards-through-massachusetts-ai-hub Source for AI Models Innovation Challenge awards.
  12. Massachusetts Capital Budget – D050 Applied AI Hub. https://budget.digital.mass.gov/capital/fy25/beneficiary-agency/economic-development/eo-of-economic-development/d050/ Source for FY2025 and FY2025-FY2029 capital budget figures.
  13. Massachusetts DESE – Integrating Artificial Intelligence: Massachusetts AI Task Force Recommendations. https://www.doe.mass.edu/edtech/ai/integrating-artificial-intelligence.pdf Source for K-12 recommendations.
  14. Mass.gov – Governor Healey Announces Massachusetts to Become First State to Deploy ChatGPT Across Executive Branch. https://www.mass.gov/news/governor-healey-announces-massachusetts-to-become-first-state-to-deploy-chatgpt-across-executive-branch Source for public-sector AI Assistant announcement.
  15. Mass.gov – EOTSS Announces Workforce Training Partnership with InnovateUS. https://www.mass.gov/news/eotss-announces-workforce-training-partnership-with-innovateus Source for generative AI training for state technology staff.
  16. WBUR – Massachusetts launching ChatGPT assistant across executive branch. https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/02/17/massachusetts-healey-ai-chatgpt-contract Used to corroborate executive-branch AI Assistant rollout and employee training context.
  17. The Open Accelerator. https://the-open-accelerator.com/ Reviewed for AI startup ecosystem support, mentorship, GPU access, and community.
  18. CommCorp – Massachusetts Launches Free Online AI Training for Residents. https://commcorp.org/blog/massachusetts-launches-free-online-ai-training-for-residents Reviewed as workforce-system amplification of the Google AI training opportunity.
  19. MassHire Greater New Bedford – Free AI Training Now Available for Residents of Massachusetts. https://masshiregreaternewbedford.com/free-ai-training-now-available-for-residents-of-massachusetts/ Reviewed as MassHire dissemination of the Google training offer.
  20. MassHire Central Career Center – Free Google AI Training. https://masshirecentralcc.com/training/free-google-ai-training/ Reviewed as MassHire dissemination of the Google training offer.
  21. InnovateUS – Artificial Intelligence for the Public Sector. https://innovate-us.org/workshop-series/artificial-intelligence-for-the-public-sector/ Reviewed for free public-sector AI training context.
  22. Mass Open Cloud Alliance – $100 Million State AI Investment. https://massopen.cloud/100-million-state-ai-investment-leveraging-moc-alliance-infrastructure/ Reviewed for AI Hub/MGHPCC infrastructure context.
  23. Axios Boston – Free AI training is coming to all Massachusetts residents. https://www.axios.com/local/boston/2026/02/26/healey-google-ai-training-massachusetts Reviewed for media confirmation of Google partnership.
  24. Axios Boston – Massachusetts taps tech leaders for AI task force. https://www.axios.com/local/boston/2024/02/14/massachusetts-ai-task-force-members-chosen Reviewed for February 2024 AI Task Force context.

Recently, my dear friend, Year Up colleague and work “therapist” Betsy said “I know a lot about your dad.  Tell me about your mom.

My mother Hovah Vonda Hall Underwood left this earth on September 24, 2004.  At her memorial service, I spoke about 6 of the most important lessons she taught me and those who were fortunate enough to have known her by the way she lived her 85 years:

1. “Take care of yourself.”

We found a file in my mother‘s desk over the weekend labeled, “inspirational quotes.” One of the items in the file was a handwritten page titled Don’t forget to note. In the first quote was “age is not an important unless you are a cheese.”

As amazing as it sounds, my mother spent only 27 of her 30,561 days in the hospital, and 12 of those were to give birth to my sisters and me. At the age of 82, my mother planned a vacation to Canaan Valley State Park. During that trip we also visited Blackwater Falls where she insisted on walking down and back up over 100 stairs to see the beautiful river.

How did she stay so healthy? My mother was wise. Living at a time when the benefits of diet and exercise were not nearly as well known or promoted as they are today, my mother knew. When we were kids, our next-door neighbors often had hamburgers and French fries or heaping plates of pasta for dinner but not us. Never French fries. Occasionally pasta, but only if accompanied by three vegetables – two green and one starch. And, we had to eat three bites of everything, no matter how “yucky” it was.

I can remember when I was around 10 years old my mother doing leg lifts on her bedroom floor and other exercises to accomplish what we now call “strengthening the core.“ Today, these exercises are performed daily by professional athletes and weekend warriors as well.

My mother had amazing discipline. She somehow managed to live in the Governor’s Mansion – home of the world’s largest cookie jar always full of Ryad’s chocolate chip cookies – and not gain a pound! I am sure I put on more weight during a weekend visit than she did living there for four (actually eight in total) years.

 

2.  “Sweat the details.

Manners, appearance and cleanliness matter.

As children, we were all home schooled with the details Emily Post’s book of etiquette. I can assure you my sisters and I were as thrilled about this part of our education as most kids would be today. But I can also assure you that a few years later, when attending a formal eight course dinner at Oxford or the Greenbrier or the White House, we were thankful we knew what to do with all that silverware.

When my father became governor at the age of 34 in 1956, my mother was thrust upon the national stage with him. She knew that part of her role as First Lady was to represent the people of West Virginia on that stage and that her appearance and performance were important elements to transforming the brand of our state. A few weeks before she passed on, mother told my sister Sharon that she would make sure to look especially good on the days she wasn’t feeling so well, so that others were less likely to notice.  Great advice I have used frequently over the past year.

 

3. “Never stop learning.”

My mother believed in lifelong learning, and was a devoted consumer of newspapers, magazines, books and especially her beloved NPR

In 1995, my ex-wife Patty and I gave my mother a computer for Christmas. Before leaving West Virginia, we wrote out detailed instructions on exactly (we thought) how to compose and send an email.  When we returned home to Toronto, we found several “emails” from her that read something like this:

Dear Patty and Craig, thank you for the wonderful comp

Dear Patty and Craig thank you for the wonderful comp

Dear Patty and Craig thank you for the wonderful comp

 Need help, the words keep disappearing!

We realized that the words were scrolling off the screen – not something that happens on an IBM selectric typewriter!  So, at the time, we thought maybe a computer wasn’t the best gift idea we ever had. But just three days before she passed, we were thrilled to receive an email from mom, announcing that after almost a decade of “needing to learn to use email,” she had succeeded!

 

4. “Talk a lot and communicate with your family. “

After Jordan was born I asked mom for her advice on being a parent.  Without pause she said “Communicate. Talk to your kids as much as you can and make sure you listen to them when they talk. And you and Patty talk and listen to each other too.”

After leaving the Governor’s Mansion, my father thought it would be a good idea to return to the family home in Huntington. My mother thought differently, wanting it to be a short drive to see  her Charleston grand kids. Guess who won?

Mom was always there for her family, whether that meant walking upstairs stadium or theater stairs to watch a ball game or see a play, or flying to Toronto and Boston for grandparents day. Her home was filled with pictures of her kids and her grand children.  And even at 85, she was still the cruise director of the family, scheduling vacations, cooking Easter dinner, and planning our annual family photo shoot.

 

5. “Always be an optimist.“

My mother truly did see a world where the glass was always “half full. “ She almost never complained and had the almost unbelievable strength to make it through even the most difficult times. When it was time to leave the Governor’s Mansion in 2001, my siblings and I thought it would be a good idea for mom and dad to move to Edgewood Summit, a beautiful independent and assisted living facility. They thought otherwise, and again, they won. One of the reasons my mom gave for not wanting to live there was she didn’t want to look like a “little old lady riding the bus.” At that time she was 83 years old and maybe 5’10 and 1/2” tall on a good day, but I remember thinking, “if you think you don’t look like a little old lady, we can roll with that!”

 

6. “Help others in need.”

Proverbs Chap. 3: vs 27–28 reminds us:

Do not withhold good from those who need help, when it is in your power to help them. Do not say to your neighbor, go and come again tomorrow I will give it – when you have it with you today.”

As the newspapers’ wonderful stories about my mother’s passing reminded us, her legacy is not only that of a loving wife, mother and grandmother, but also of a devoted public servant in her own quiet way. From her early career as a social worker to making time to support the Cammack Children Center for Orphans – even as a young mother with three small children and a traveling husband – to her incredible service as the first lady of West Virginia, my mother used all of her resources and assets to help those in need, to help those who were not lucky enough to have parents or access to education or basic healthcare. She was a tireless and effective advocate for children and women’s issues and we can all honor her life’s work by following in her footsteps

Although my mother’s body left this earth in 2004, to all who were blessed to know her and especially those of us who got to call her mom or grand mom, her soul and spirit are very much with us today and will remain forever in the lessons she taught by how she lived:

  • Take care of yourself
  • Sweat the details
  • Never stop learning
  • Love and communicate with your family
  • Always be optimistic, and
  • Help others in need.

My mother kept this quote from Emerson on her desk:

To laugh often and much: to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to appreciate beauty; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.  This is to have succeeded.   

 My mother clearly succeeded.

 

A few years ago I wrote “A coffee for a coffee, a car for a car, $10 for porn?” an article about several positive experiences with businesses’ quick action to make up for service failures.

Recently, I had a similar experience with Gild Hall, my favorite NYC hotel.  Located a short walk from Year Up’s awesome NYC offices, I found Gild Hall on hotels.com several years ago. It’s an incredibly cool boutique hotel with an amazing staff and a great small bar and restaurant.  A few weeks ago I booked a room at Gild Hall for several nights to help my daughter move into her new apartment and meet with several colleagues in our New York office.

Because I was in my “panic training” mode for this year’s PMC, I got a late start leaving Boston and arrived in NYC just in time to pick up my friend in Harlem for dinner.  Several hours later I was on my way to Gild Hall and thought I would call to let them know I was arriving soon.  Andrew, the night manager, answered and was incredibly apologetic as he informed me that they did not have a room for me.  The hotel was fully booked, a guest had fallen ill and was taken to the hospital earlier in the day.  Understandably, they couldn’t kick the sick person or their family out of the room.  They tried to reach my earlier, but had an incorrect phone number on the reservation from hotels.com.  Andrew told me that they had booked a room for me at the Beekman, a sister hotel only a few blocks away. Frustrated, I drove to the Beekman to check in.

If you haven’t been there, the Beekman is also an incredibly cool hotel, located inside what was originally called Temple Court, the 134 year old building that was one of Manhattan’s original “sky scrapers.”  It has been impeccably renovated with a soaring courtyard bar and two very good restaurants. I checked in around 1:30 am, and with several bags and CHUbike, accepted the help of the late night bellman to my room. He was incredibly friendly, very professional and engaged me in a conversation about biking.  I learned his name was Odane Small.  Born in Jamaica, Odane had recently moved to the US.

Gild Hall called me the next morning and let me know that my room was ready.  As I packed up, I remembered how impressed I was with Odane and thought he might be interested in Year Up. I have a personal goal to recruit at least one student a month to join Year Up and carry with me a small information card created Kim Wheeler from our awesome marketing team. I tried to find Odane when I checked out, but he had left for the day so I gave my business card and the student info card to another bellman and asked him to give them to him.  Later that evening, Odane called me to follow-up and is now in the process of applying to Year Up NYC.

That alone would have made up for the frustration I encountered the evening before, but the story gets better. When I arrived at Gild Hall, Manager David Finch greeted me with the news that (a) they had comped my room at the Beekman for Saturday night and (b) they had upgraded me to one of their amazing suites for the remainder of my stay.  And when I entered my room I found a note from David along with a huge fruit basket and a very nice bottle of wine.  Both totally unnecessary and greatly appreciated.

Needless to say, I am now more than ever a “raving fan” customer of Gild Hall for life.

As noted in my earlier article about customer service disaster recovery, we look at customer service disasters as a “crisis” in the way that some interpret the Chinese character for crisis as being comprised of the symbol for danger and the symbol for opportunity.  No business wants to be on the creating end of a customer service disaster, but how they react and recover is what separates those who capitalize on the inherent opportunity of the situation from those who will certainly lose the customer on the receiving end.  Increasingly, poor customer service will also cost you the business of the customer’s friends, relatives and others as user generated reviews continue grow and become a major part of the consumer purchase decision making process. Customer service disasters – as long as they are infrequent, recognized, and acted upon – can be opportunities for increasing customer loyalty. Clearly that was the case with the David Finch and the team at Gild Hall.

P.S. I actually feel at least partially at fault for what happened on that Saturday night.  During the 3+ hour drive from Boston to NY I kept thinking that I should call the hotel to let them know of my late arrival.  My bad for not doing so!  Apologies to Andrew, the night manager, for my less than honorable reaction to the news my room was not available!

 

Net: A Year Up student recently asked me if I had any favorite any motivational words or slogans.  I told her about the 4 T-shirts we wore at Sports Loyalty International: Carpe Diem; Never, Ever Quit, No Regrets & Breakthrough.  After speaking with her, I realized they applied to my current role at Year Up as well.

My favorite “unsuccessful” company has to be Sports Loyalty International.  We had a great, fun, talented team; phenomenally supportive investors; an all-star advisory board; and what we believed was a uniquely transformative program and business model.  We also had cool T-shirts.

In addition to making the morning wardrobe choice a very easy one, the words on SLI’s 4 T-shirts became motivating slogans to our 8 person team and closest advisors.  Recently, while visiting Year Up’s Atlanta site with GE CTO and Year Up champion Adam Radisch, I met an amazing young woman named Ariel Terrell.

Ariel asked me if I had any favorite words or slogans that I turned to for inspiration and motivation.  She shared that she was planning to cover the walls of her basement family room with inspirational words for her kids. I asked the young lady how many children she had and was surprised when she responded “five.”  Ariel explained that she had adopted her sister’s three children several years ago when her sibling was unable to care for them and then had two of her own.  I asked her “When do you sleep?” and she responded “rarely!” This is one of literally hundreds of stories I could tell you about the grit and determination of our students.  They are the embodiment of the Year Up brand, the primary reason we have grown from serving 22 students in 2001 to 3,700 this year and my greatest source of inspiration and energy.

So, back to our T-Shirts.  I told Ariel about our slogans: Carpe Diem; Never Ever Quit; No Regrets and Breakthrough, and also shared a few inspirational quotes. On the plane back to Boston, I thought about these slogans and realized they also apply to those of us who lead corporate partner development for Year Up.

Carpe Diem

I probably first heard the phrase Carpe Diem in the movie Dead Poets Society.  I also heard it in my head over and over again when making the decision to accept the offer from Sir Keith Mills in 1991 to start the Loyalty Group in Canada. As entrepreneurs at SLI, we realized that every day was a gift from our investors.  They believed enough in our vision and our team to give us the opportunity to create a new type of loyalty program that had never been successfully developed in the world’s largest market. At the same time we were keenly aware – as are all start-up’s – that we had limited funds and therefore days to close the requisite number of customers to create an economically viable business before running out of capital.  To us, Carpe Diem meant seize the opportunity you have been given to create the future every minute of every day you work.    I have a similar feeling about Year Up.  I remind myself every day that I am incredibly fortunate and privileged to work in service to our amazing students and the opportunities corporate partners like GE give them to cross the Opportunity Divide.

Never Ever Quit

True confessions – we stole this from Winston Churchill’s “never, never, quit.” This was our mantra when three of us started The Loyalty Group in a Toronto hotel room in 1991 and became our business development rallying cry during the 8 years I was fortunate to run the company.  While in Canada, I was often asked to speak to business school students and share our strategy and leadership principals at other companies’ management team meetings and executive retreats.  A common question was “what’s the key to success when starting a business?”  Without hesitation, I always responded “creative perseverance.”

Creative perseverance is something I learned from my father who still holds the record for being both the youngest and the oldest person ever elected governor of a US state.  What most people don’t remember is that he actually lost three elections in between these historic milestones – an experience that would have eliminated the desire to ever run for elective office again in most human beings – but not him.  During his successful 1996 campaign, he didn’t re-use the slogans or policies from earlier attempts, but instead developed a platform around using technology to improve the employment opportunities and quality of life for West Virginians.  He adopted the slogan “A Leader for New Times,” secured the URL governor.com and created one of the first political campaign web sites.

The point of creative perseverance is to “never, ever, quit” but – equally important – it is to remember Einstein’s definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” When I was Loyalty’s CEO It took me six years to land what became one of our largest customers and likely doubled the value of the company.  Every quarter I emailed the target CEO, but I never sent him the same message as the previous quarter.  I never wrote, “Hey it’s me again, asking for yet another meeting to talk about our loyalty program.”  Instead, I sent him examples of new innovations we had created to add value to other corporate partners: a recent case study on the ROI from investing in our program from a similar business; a new internet marketing application we had developed; a new database marketing product; the increased percentage of households in his store’s trading area that had joined our program; and our latest research showing the number of customers who would increase their spending at his stores if he joined our coalition. After literally six years of this water torture, he eventually succumbed and became (and remains) one of our most important customers.  At the dinner when we celebrated the signing of our contract, he said “you eventually became too logical to ignore.”

While I hope it never takes 6 years to convince a new corporate partner to hire Year Up interns and graduates, I recently realized that while I have diligently followed the mantra of “never, ever quit,” I have often failed to remember the importance of “creative perseverance.” Far too often, I emailed or called unresponsive targets with a message asking for an initial or follow-up meeting.  That actually worked in several instances as I secured meetings with leading companies after months of weekly requests, but – realizing my lack of creativity – I now wonder how much more efficient my efforts could have been if I included new case studies, articles, success stories, etc. from other Year Up partners in their industries.  One of the great things about Year Up is we have not only great “sizzle” – student and partner video testimonials, the 60 Minutes episode, etc., but also great “steak” – real quantitative studies and evidence of the value we create with our partners.  And with 3,700 students in 17 locations providing talent to over 200 corporate partners this year, we are constantly creating a steady stream of new “sizzle” and “steak” that can be used to accelerate our business development sales cycle.

No Regrets

“No regrets” is pretty simple.  At SLI, we refused to say the words “would have, should have, could have” the morning after losing a sale.  It means doing your very best, seizing every opportunity and “leaving it all on the canvas,” to use a boxing metaphor.  Although I loved the three years we worked together to try and get SLI off the ground, I had no regrets when we finally ran out of runway and investor patience. We gave it our best shot and used the full capabilities of our extraordinary team and partners.

But to be clear, “no regrets” does not imply that we never made mistakes.  One of our Operating Principals was “We learn from our mistakes, we don’t dwell on them.” I have always believed that I learn more from my mistakes than almost any other activity.  At The Loyalty Group, we hosted an annual “Global Experience Sharing Conference” where the management teams of sister companies from the UK, Netherlands and Spain would get together.  A highlight of these meetings was sharing “The 10 Dumbest Things We Tried Last Year.”  I recently realized I should be sharing the mistakes I have made over the last several months with the team members who work with me across the country.

Breakthrough

By definition, entrepreneurs are trying to create a product or service that has never existed before – otherwise, there would be no entrepreneurial opportunity.  Successfully creating a new product or service requires all of the above, but it also requires “breakthrough moments” when a prospective customer or investor “gets it.”  Although I realize some other experts disagree with me, I am a firm believer in “shooting all of the arrows in your quiver” when making sales presentations.  By that I mean using both steak and sizzle – data, testimonials, videos, etc. – as efficiently as possible when developing and implementing your sales and marketing tools and materials.  The logic for this is simple – you often don’t know which arrow is going to hit the prospect’s “sweet spot.”  Research tells us that using PowerPoint or other visual devices increases a prospect’s retention of your pitch by 30% vs just having a conversation, but it can’t tell you what form or medium will be most effective with an individual target.  There are several styles of learning and – unless you can get reliable inside knowledge about what forms will be most effective with your prospect – it behooves us to efficiently try all at our disposal.

At SLI, we developed what we affectionately called the “Blow Fish Strategy.” Initially there were just four of us competing against my former company The Loyalty Group – by then a billion dollar enterprise with an impressive 20 year track record – so we needed to develop low cost ways of making us look more substantial than we actually were. Our strategies included:

  • Buying low cost (i.e. $200) iPads from my former Bain colleague’s online retailer glyde.com, co-branding with SLI and our partners logos on a customer “skin”, creating a screen saver that looked like the iPad had been custom developed and programmed to only include our overview presentation, focus group videos of their customers saying they would increase sales if they could earn loyalty points and high quality images of their and other leading businesses displaying our point of sale materials.
  • Bringing on Toni Oberholzer and her “one wonder woman” creative firm OVO as a partner. Toni developed incredibly high quality loyalty program cards, membership kits, mobile apps and partner collateral for our business development meetings.  She worked under and delivered against ridiculous turn-around times and charged us a fraction of what one of the “big agencies” would have cost.
  • We figured out how to transform our presentations Toni’s brilliant creative into a hard cover Shutterfly books. We had these books individually produced with the names of the executives we met with and they arrived at their offices within 4 days of our initial meetings. Best of all – they actually cost less than having a presentation printed and bound with a plastic cover at FedEx!
  • Shout out to my Co-Founder Lauren Creedon for leading all of the above.

We found that individual aspects of the blow fish strategy worked well with different individuals.  For some, the creative mock ups “got them;” for others it was our videos of their customers’ voices or our program results from leaders in their industries from the Loyalty Group’s AIR MILES program.  In a few cases, we had “insider information” and knew – for example – to not share our focus group videos with the Vice Chairman of the Red Sox, who was more of a “numbers guy.”  But if not, we would live test each element to see what worked with each target executive and use their feedback to tailor our message.

Recently, several of my Year Up colleagues and I have realized there exists a “7 Step” business development process we need to progress through to reach our goal of becoming a significant strategic source of entry level talent for our corporate partners:

We also realized that progressing from one step to the next often happens after a “breakthrough” moment and that over our 17 year history, we have developed a number of “breakthrough accelerators” that can reduce the sales cycle between each step. Examples include:

  • A Year Up Champion changes roles or companies, e.g. David Kenny became General Manager of IBM Watson; Jeff Robison became COO of WorldPay.
  • An article is published about a Year Up Corporate Partnership, e.g. State Street and American Banker.
  • A new Year Up Corporate Partner video is developed. e.g. Year Up Cyber Security Curriculum developed in partnership with Symantec, eBay and LinkedIn.
  • The establishment of a cross functional internal Corporate Partner Steering Committee focused on maximizing the value proposition of their partnership with Year Up. JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and others have done this.
  • Opportunities for Year Up executives to present at high level cross functional meetings, like GE’s CIO Council.

Those of us who lead our largest relationships our now collaborating with marketing and sales operations support to collect and share these and other best demonstrated practices to help accelerate our mission delivery.

Please let me know your motivating words and slogans – on T-Shirts, board room or basement walls or otherwise – and I’ll share them with Ariel and her five children.

Thanks

CHU

Thanks to Vanessa Kirsch and Kelly Fitzsimmons of New Profit, I met Gerald Chertavian and got involved in creating Year Up in early 2001.

Year Up is the innovative workforce develop program founded by Gerald and Kate Chertavian that recruits and trains low income urban young adults for entry level middle skill jobs and places successful program participants in internships with America’s leading companies.

Started in July of 2001 with an inaugural class of 22 in Boston, Year Up now serves over 3,700 students a year in  17 offices across the country.  Over 85% of Year up graduates are working at leading US companies including GE, State Street, Bank of America, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Fidelity, Putnam, American Express and several State and Federal Government Departments.

Please visit the Year Up web site to learn more and get involved.  All Year Up students work with a mentor and mentoring is a great way to get started.

The 6 A’s of Coalition Loyalty Success & the Virtuous Cycle of Profitability

Net: Over a billion dollars have been lost by companies and investors trying to create a profitable coalition loyalty program in the U.S. over the past 30 years. In recent discussions with Sir Keith Mills, who created the original AIR MILES shopping reward program and the first consumer focused coalition loyalty program in the UK, my former company The Loyalty Group in Canada, Nectar in the UK  and successful programs in The Netherlands, Spain and the UAE, we agreed there are six requisite elements of successful programs.  Rewards must be aspirational, attainable, and accessible to target consumers.  They must be sufficiently affordable to investors, program operators and the business partners who pay for the reward to enable a clear and attractive return on their investment.  The program must be designed and executed to collect actionable information on participating member’s behavior to both prove that the program is delivering an attractive ROI and to identify underperforming segments and new opportunities to use the program’s assets to increase the businesses’ profitability. Finally, participants must be aware of the program’s benefits.  They must be clearly and effectively marketed at launch and on an ongoing basis to create awareness and understanding of program value to potential and existing members and the businesses paying for the rewards.   If these “6 A” elements are present in the program’s design and effectively launched and enhanced through rollout and operation, the loyalty business generates an attractive virtuous cycle of profitability driven by the value created for all stakeholders.

The 6 A’s of Coalition Loyalty Success

6 A's Chart

Read more

Net: Obama’s failure to leverage the collaborative efforts of others, consider and include good ideas from his opponents and provide the requisite and timely leadership contributed greatly to congress’ inability to pass heath care reform.  Will the rhetoric and approaches of the last two weeks be enough to revive it or are they too little too late?

dr-mark-in-haiti2I have often wondered if there is a common event that gets people to start blogging.  I imagine for many it’s a topic or an issue they feel so passionate about that they feel compelled to share their thoughts with others.   For a wonderful example of this, see my friend Dr. Mark Pearlmutter’s blog from his two weeks as a volunteer in Haiti.

One thing I know for sure is what stopped me – jumping into the Citizens for Alan Khazei Senate campaign for the last 55 days of the 90 day special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.  Since the campaign ended, I have had many posts “drafted” in my head, but have been experiencing some kind of weird writer’s block that kept my fingers from typing.   I began to fear that maybe leading 128 pages of policy work in under two months used up all of my words for the year!

As anyone who knows me knows – health care is my biggest issue and has been since my then six month old daughter was sick for the first time.  Fortunately, we were living in Toronto and had access to a wonderful pediatrician who returned our call at 10:00 in the evening and sent us to a world class children’s hospital a few blocks from our home.  I realized at that moment that there were millions of American’s who couldn’t have done what we did and became a dedicated soldier in the war to bring health care to all American’s and to lower the cost and improve quality for those of us lucky enough to have coverage.

I have written before about my frustration with Obama’s ineffective attempt to sell health care reform to the American people in the post What Obama can learn from Ross Perot, Cecil Underwood and Coalition Marketing.  Listening to some of his remarks about health care reform over the past ten days has me sufficiently agitated to start blogging again.  A few more suggestions for the President:

1. Look for others who have already collaborated and use them.

Last summer, I found an incredibly thorough bi-partisan proposal for health care reform called Crossing Our Lines: Working Together to Reform the U.S. Health System.  This report was written by former Senate Leaders Bob Dole, Howard Baker and Tom Daschle.  George Mitchell also was a major contributor to the project, but was not listed as an author on the final report after shifting all of his efforts to his role as special envoy to the Middle East.  The report was the product of a two-year consensus-building process called the The Leaders’ Project on the State of American Health Care.  Their plan is a comprehensive set of policy recommendations that aims to provide quality, affordable health coverage for all Americans and includes recommendations to improve quality and control costs.

crossing-our-linesHaving stumble upon this report, I was surprised that I had not heard of it from traditional news media or blogs, and disappointed that Obama wasn’t using this as a framework for his heath care reform efforts.  We used this as one of the primary sources for developing Alan Khazei’s health care policy during his race for the Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat.

Then, last week on either XM Radio’s POTUS or CNN, I heard the President refer to The Leaders report at least twice.  Saying,

“The component parts of this thing are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year.

“Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker and Tom — and certainly you don’t agree with Tom Daschle on much … but that’s not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate, and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you’d think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot.”

“And so I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well, how is it that a plan that is pretty centrist… (more)

Why didn’t he use this as an example and – better yet – use Dole and Baker to help him sell health care reform over the past twelve months?

2. Collaboration means working together and using each other’s good ideas, not just giving them lip service.

RNC Chairman Michael Steele spoke at Harvard’s Institute of Politics last week. During his remarks, he mentioned that Republicans had offered over a dozen ideas and proposals for addressing the country’s dysfunctional medical malpractice system, but none of them were given serious consideration by the administration.    If Obama is serious about lowering the cost of health care, he needs to address medical malpractice, considered by many experts to be the major driver of defensive medicine.  The cost of defensive medicine has been estimated to be between $70 billion and $200 billion a year by PriceWaterhouseCoopers Health Research Institute and others.

Again, this idea is not new.  Bill Bradley wrote about the need to form a bi-partisan coalition to pass  health care reform and the opportunity to use medical malpractice reform as an issue that would bring Republicans to the table in his 2007 book, The New American Story. He made this point again in an August 2009 New York Times Op-Ed article, Tax Reform’s Lesson for Health Care Reform.

joint-commission1On the Khazei campaign, we reached out to our network of friends we were introduced to Dr. Alan Woodward, a former President of the Massachusetts Medical Society and a passionate expert on health care cost reduction.  Dr. Woodward turned us onto the successful approaches to medical malpractice reform being successfully implemented by the University of Michigan Health System and recommended on by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations. (I will write more about this in an upcoming post on the collaborate efforts of the Khazei campaign.)

Again, the answers are out there if you truly believe in collaboration and are willing to do the work to find them.

3. Collaboration does not mean abdication of leadership.

Anyone who has engaged in a truly collaborative effort quickly realizes that harnessing the wisdom of crowds takes work.  I recently experienced this when using 99designs.com to run a contest to develop a logo for a new organization among hundreds of graphic designers from around the world.  As John Della Volpe, the Founder of SocialSphere Strategies wrote about in a recent blog post, you need to provide leadership (a clearly written brief) and guidance (continuous feedback to initial and revised designs) to get a quality product when using this or other hugely collaborative processes.

President Obama’s lack of leadership on health care has been a concern to many of us who applauded his courage to take on this most important and possibly most challenging issue.  To me, his almost hand off approach through most of 2009 felt like a “guardrail to guardrail” over-reaction to the mistakes of the Clinton administration’s health care reform efforts.  Whereas the Clinton approach is remembered as one where Hilary Clinton, Ira Magaziner and a few others developed in closed meetings the plan they expected congress to pass, the Obama administration’s approach was almost the polar opposite.  The President’s instructions to congress to “increase coverage without increasing the deficit” and his failure to make a major address about health insurance reform until late summer are two examples of the lack of leadership he provided, with what we now see as disastrous results.

According to Politico Pulse – a great new source of information I recently found on my Kindle – at the closed door session with Democrats last week, Al Frankin and others raised this concern:

Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats.   Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration’s failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact.

Obama has scheduled a Health Care Summit meeting with Republicans on February 25th.  Lets hope he provides both real collaboration and leadership and that it won’t be too little too late.

 

Passionate promoter of all I believe in. Entrepreneur, CEO, Advisor to Loyalty, Political and Social Entrepreneurs, Leaders, and Investors. Father, Brother, Athlete, Activist.

Craig Underwood, founder or co-founder of six for-profit and non-profit enterprises, was a pioneer in developing data-based customer loyalty programs and has been an innovator in the social media and nonprofit spaces.  His consulting firm, Underwood Partners, LLC, advises leading companies, venture capitalists, loyalty, social, and political entrepreneurs.

Previously, Craig founded The Loyalty Group in Canada, which became one of the largest multi-company customer loyalty programs in the world with 70% of households active members of the program. Started by Craig and two colleagues in a Toronto hotel room, the company now generates over a billion dollars in annual revenue and employs over 2000.  The Loyalty Group was consistently listed as both One of the Best Companies to Work For and One of the Best Companies for Women.  Craig was also a partner at the global strategy consulting firm Bain & Company and Bain’s nonprofit affiliate, The Bridgespan Group.

In addition to his professional career, Craig is an advocate of giving back to the community. He was a  Founding Board Member and Sr. Director of National Accounts for Year Up, the innovative nationwide workforce development program that recruits, trains, and places low-income inner-city young adults in living wage careers with Fortune 500 companies.  He was also a founding board member of Horizons for Homeless Children, a Boston-based nonprofit that provides preschool to the city’s homeless children, and serves as a volunteer executive and Tennis Coach at The Sportsmens Tennis & Enrichment Center’s Volley Against Violence program – an initiative started by 2 Boston Police Officers that serves 4 to 14-year-old low-income inner city kids.

A self-professed “news and political junkie,” Craig served as Alan Khazei’s Policy Director during his 2009 US Senate race and Vice Chair of his 2020 Congressional campaign. He was a founding member of United for Democracy.  Craig also worked to cure rejected mail-in ballots in Wisconsin and conducted GOTV operations in Maine in October and November 2020, as well as in the US Senate runoff election in January 2021 and 2023.

A graduate of West Virginia University, Craig served as Student Body President, was named WVU’s 19th Rhodes Scholar, and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1980.  He also received a master’s degree in politics, economics, and philosophy from Oxford University and a master’s in business administration from the University of Chicago in 1984.

Craig was named Marketer of the Year and has been featured in three HBS Case Studies.  He has published numerous articles on loyalty, entrepreneurial success, and leadership, and blogs at CollaborationEvangelist.com.  Craig has two adult children.  He is an active snowboarder, tennis player, and cyclist, and raises money for Pediatric Brain Cancer by riding in the Pan Mass Challenge every August, as well as for Afghan War widows through Beyond the Bike, a 260-mile ride from Ground Zero to Needham, Massachusetts.

Craig is a member of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopalian (AME) Church in Jamaica Plain.

Net: The fact that 50% of all consumers are engaging with social media, but less than 40% of businesses are doing so means that some companies are leaving their customers exposed to competitor’s initiatives. BMW is one of many examples.

Last fall, I leased a new BMW X3 to replace my old one whose lease was expiring.The replacement X3 did not have the built-in navigation of its predecessor, so I decided to go online to search for a portable unit.First stop was BMW.com, where I expected to find an owners’ community where I would be able to ask others for advice.

When Underwood Partners conducts a Web 2.0 audit for clients, one of the outputs is a “heat map” that visually shows competitive and complimentary companies’ use of social media technology tools. The map is color coded: green represents a highly visible and useful application; yellow represents an application that is either buried deep in the site, poorly marketed or has a confusing user interface; red indicates that either the company is not using the application or we can’t find it. And given the amount of time we spend online, if we can’t find it, we don’t believe customers will either. [Note this graphic was first developed by Max Palmer when we worked together at Social Sphere.  Max claims it was called a “Palmer Map.” He’s a great analyst, but not so good on the marketing front!]

If we were doing a Web 2.0 audit of www.BMWUSA.com, the column Customer Forums would clearly be coded red.Although “My Account” has lots of information about how to make payments, pay off my lease early, order a new vehicle, etc., I couldn’t find any place to connect with other customers.So, I logged onto Edmunds.com, one of the pioneers of providing user reviews, customer forums, and other Web 2.0 applications in the automotive space.

On the Edmunds’ site, it was easy to find a BMW X3 Forum in their “Car Space” section where I was able to start an online discussion asking for help with aftermarket navigation systems. But as I was doing so, I noticed that Cadillac ads began appearing on the page. By not investing in Web 2.0 applications like customer forums, BMW literally drove me to a place where I was being served up competitors’ ads.

Some businesses delay developing a Web 2.0 strategy because they are afraid of “losing control” and fear their customers will post negative comments about their products on their own web sites. As this example shows, if you don’t provide an opportunity for customers to talk to you and each others about your products, someone else will. At best, you will have lost an opportunity for customer engagement, research and communication. At worst, you will be giving a third party the opportunity to monetize your customer through selling ads to a competitor. Which, at the end of the day, could ultimately cost you the customer’s business.