Scania dropped the mandatory module and ran the literacy as a team conversation

A progress bar can go green while the question on the desk stays unanswered. The organisation has a completion. The person has the same Monday.

Patrik Hedljung's account is from the Workforce track at aiblLIVE London on 20 October 2026. He is AI Adoption Manager at Scania. The page records a truck maker of 65,000 people, with more than 100 years behind it, and a start he describes as zero mandate, zero budget and zero strategy. It says the figures are as he stated them on stage.

The window he used was a legal one. The EU AI Act became the largest opening. He won ownership of the response from the legal department, and legal signs off the content. In place of a 15-minute mandatory e-learning, the page says, the company runs seven hours that a team takes together. His line is specific. "Instead of a 15-minute mandatory e-learning that people hate, we produced a 7-hour dialogue that actually people thought was valuable." The course is built on that dialogue. It covers compliance, agentic AI and the team's own use cases, and it is facilitated digitally so it can scale. More than 2,000 people completed the first version. There was no executive push behind them.

He does not trust a long sequence to survive the subject. A method planned across three to five years, he says, will be overtaken before it starts, because the preconditions change weekly. He treats adoption as a movement, starts before the rulebook is finished, and moves when a window opens. He partnered with IT, which knew the technology and did not know the change. Compliance still calls him in about once a month. He treats that as the right balance. The page does not say what those calls changed.

The hire is where a sentence shows its speed. He proposed adding a line or two about AI to every Scania job advert. After two years, the wording had appeared in a senior accountant advert, and the hiring manager said it was working well. He sees the company moving from growth at the bottom to attention at the top. That is his reading of the moment. The page does not count the adverts. It does not say the 65,000 have finished the seven hours. Two thousand is the first version completed. The rest is not a result in this account.

He also separates two words a rollout tends to fold together. "We talk a lot about agents, but I think agency is the more important thing to have and nurture." He had spent 30 years in learning and leadership development before he moved into IT to drive the adoption. The sequence the page actually gives is the dialogue, the legal owner and the slow hire. It is not a claim that the company is finished.

1. Retire the module people already click through, and put a conversation in its place. The comparison he draws is fifteen minutes of mandatory e-learning against seven hours a team takes together, on compliance, on agentic AI and on that team's own cases.

2. Give the content an owner who can refuse it. Legal signs off. A dialogue with no one willing to put their name on it is a different programme from the one on this page.

3. Do not promote 2,000 into the company. More than 2,000 people finished the first version, with no executive push. The headcount he states is 65,000. The account leaves that gap open, and a slide that closes it is adding a number he did not give.

4. Count the adverts before you count the policy. He asked for a sentence or two on every job advert. Two years later it was on a senior accountant advert, and one hiring manager said it was working. One advert is the evidence. Every advert is the proposal.

An AI training session is a practical place to take the short module a team already skips and replace it with one conversation about a case that team already has, with the person who must sign the content in the room.