In this episode of This New Way, Aydin sits down with Maddie Engelmeier, AI leader at Motive, to dive deep into how her team is transforming employee productivity with AI. Motive has set an ambitious company-wide goal: boost productivity by 50%. Maddie shares the three-tier strategy behind this initiative, showcases real AI agents in action—from self-assessment tools to executive account summaries—and explains how Motive fosters an AI-native culture across 100,000 customers and 1.3 million drivers.
From using Glean to power performance reviews, to leveraging Notebook LM for instant enablement videos, Maddie gives a behind-the-scenes look at how AI is not just saving time but elevating effectiveness across the company.
Timestamps
0:00 – Setting the stage: Motive’s ambitious 50% productivity goal
1:04 – Maddie introduces Motive and her role leading AI initiatives
3:12 – The three-tier AI adoption framework (democratization, automation, transformation)
6:51 – Why Motive adopted Glean and how it evolved from search to an agentic platform
8:08 – Demo: Self-assessment agent for performance reviews
13:06 – How Glean pulls from Slack, Drive, Gmail & more to save recall time
15:19 – Probing reflection questions vs. copy-paste AI output
19:02 – Over 1,000 unique runs: thousands of hours saved in one cycle
19:27 – Stakeholder feedback agent explained
21:21 – Shifting from recall to reflection and effectiveness
23:50 – Demo: Executive account summary agent for customer insights
27:55 – Scaling AI internally: AI labs, Genius Bars & Slack communities
31:00 – Why AI is enhancing—not killing—creativity
32:07 – Notebook LM demo: from docs to enablement videos in seconds
35:27 – How weekly “snippets” create accountability and unblock teams
36:00 – Agents growing faster than employees—future of work projections
38:05 – Scaling adoption with big, relevant use cases
39:09 – Maddie’s outlook: building comfort with experimentation and collaboration
Tools & Technologies Mentioned
Glean – AI-powered enterprise search and agentic workflow builder, securely connected to company data sources.
Notebook LM – Google’s AI notebook that now generates enablement videos instantly from documents.
Salesforce, Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Confluence – Data sources integrated into Motive’s AI agents for recall and analysis.
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