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Quests, token leaderboards, and a skills marketplace: the elite AI adoption playbook | John Kim

John Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Delight.ai, a customer experience platform that’s transforming how companies deploy AI. But what makes John’s story fascinating isn’t just his product; it’s how he’s turned his entire company into an AI-native organization. His marketing team built a fully functional e-commerce swag store with Stripe integration in days. His sales team built their own CRM tools. His recruiting team automated their entire workflow. And it’s all tracked, measured, and celebrated through an internal platform called Automators. *What you’ll learn:* 1. How Sendbird’s marketing team built a fully functional swag store with Stripe integration in a day (with no engineering support) 2. How the Automators platform works—an internal marketplace where anyone can request AI tools and engineers (or AI agents) can build them 3. How to create secure, compliant templates so non-technical teams can ship to production safely 4. How Sendbird built a token usage dashboard with five tiers (beginner through AI God) and why tracking the smoothness of the curve matters more than the total 5. Why visible leadership usage is the most powerful adoption signal 6. Why Sendbird rewrote job descriptions to prioritize curiosity, agency, and energy over years of experience 7. How John uses AI for his own learning *Brought to you by:* WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready today: https://workos.com?utm_source=lennys_howiai&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=q22025 ThoughtSpot—Build AI-powered analytics into your product: https://go.thoughtspot.com/howIAI *In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Introduction to John Kim (02:45) The Delight.ai swag store built by marketing in two days (05:51) The before times: when fun had to earn its place on the roadmap (07:55) Demo: The Automators platform and quest system (13:47) The AI Engineer for Internal Operations role (16:06) Demo: The company-wide skills marketplace (17:19) Treating AI adoption as a product (18:43) Real wins: team-level and campaign examples (21:51) Why SaaS isn’t dead—it’s being rebuilt internally (23:46) Demo: The token tracking dashboard (26:32) Measuring without fear: setting expectations, not punishments (28:54) Quick recap (30:51) Personal AI use cases: endless knowledge at your fingertips (36:15) Lightning round and final thoughts *Tools referenced:* • Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code • Codex (OpenAI): https://openai.com/codex • Obsidian: https://obsidian.md • GitHub: https://github.com • Stripe: https://stripe.com *Other references:* • Jason Levin (CEO of Memelord) on How I AI: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/from-a-690-newsletter-to-3m-api-how • Konami Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code • Andrew Huberman’s podcast: https://hubermanlab.com/ • Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ *Where to find John Kim:* X: https://x.com/doshkim Instagram: https://instagram.com/dosh LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doshkim/ Company: https://delight.ai Delight.ai Spark Conference (May 7, SF): https://delight.ai/spark *Where to find Claire Vo:* ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo _Production and marketing by https://penname.co/._ _For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co._

John KimguestClaire Vohost
May 6, 202642mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Sendbird’s AI adoption playbook: quests, leaderboards, and internal marketplaces

  1. Sendbird empowered non-engineering teams (especially marketing) to ship production-grade experiences—like a full swag store with Stripe—in days using AI-assisted building.
  2. The company created an internal “Automators” quest system where employees post automation needs and others (humans and AI agents) build and deliver reusable workflows.
  3. A dedicated “AI Engineer for Internal Operations” function partners with CTO/InfoSec to provide a vetted, secure default stack, templates, and daily-updated guides that make shipping safe and easy.
  4. Adoption is actively managed via token-usage dashboards and a tiered leaderboard (from beginner to “AI god”), used for coaching and expectation-setting rather than performance punishment.
  5. Beyond work tooling, Kim demonstrates personal AI knowledge systems (e.g., “Gardener” for notes and auto-generated learning wikis) to highlight AI’s leverage for continuous learning and curiosity.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Make AI adoption a product, not a policy.

Sendbird built explicit UX for adoption—quests, marketplaces, rewards, templates, and dashboards—so using AI feels like participating in a system designed to help, not a mandate from leadership.

Let non-engineering teams ship real production value.

The marketing-built swag store illustrates a core outcome: when creative teams can build and deploy safely, “fun” and culture-forward experiences become feasible without fighting for roadmap priority.

Use a quest marketplace to bypass traditional prioritization bottlenecks.

Quests convert internal needs into well-scoped, volunteer-friendly projects with fast feedback loops, enabling “micro-projects” to get done outside rigid sprint planning.

Standardize a secure “happy path” to production.

Templates with authentication, environments, and pre-vetted tooling reduce risky shadow IT and stop employees from deploying sensitive tools to the public internet just to get something working.

Instrument usage, but frame it as enablement—not surveillance.

Token dashboards and tiers help managers tailor coaching (beginner → intermediate → expert) while explicitly avoiding the “lines of code” trap and keeping it out of performance reviews.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

This is an internal platform where anyone in the company can raise their hand and create what we call the quest. When there's a quest, AI can actually read through the specification, create PRDs, and start actually coding.

— John Kim

It's taking someone's super creativity and giving them powers to, to deliver it to your customers.

— Claire Vo

Basically a marketplace of AI needs and AI builders inside your company where anybody can just pop in and say, "Oh, I, I think I know how to do that."

— Claire Vo

We measure AI gods as somebody who spend more than 100 million tokens a day.

— John Kim

This is a beautiful time to fail forward and still get up and run faster than the others, right? So use more examples of that, and people bring out their confidence, so you have to really build energy around those people.

— John Kim

Marketing as builders (swag store, Easter eggs, Stripe)Automators platform and “quests”AI agents generating PRDs and codeSecure internal app templates and compliance-by-defaultAI Engineer for Internal Operations and cross-functional task forceCompany-wide skills/plugin marketplaceToken consumption dashboards, tiers, and enablement

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