How Motive Uses 1,000+ AI Agents to Boost Productivity by 50% with Maddie Engelmeier

Aug 19, 2025

Maddie Engelmeier, AI leader at Motive, discusses her role in transforming productivity with AI. She details a three-tier strategy aimed at boosting efficiency by 50%. Maddie showcases AI agents like a self-assessment tool for performance reviews, which promotes reflection over rote responses. The conversation also covers tech like Glean, which integrates various tools to streamline workflows, and an executive summary agent that delivers customer insights. Hear how they cultivate an AI-driven culture across a vast user base!

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INSIGHT

Three-Tier Productivity Strategy

Motive set a company-wide OKR to increase employee productivity by 50% and built a three-tier strategy to reach it.
The tiers are democratization, automation, and transformation, each building on the previous one.

ADVICE

Make AI A Clear Leadership Priority

Make AI an explicit leadership priority and set clear expectations in job descriptions.
Appoint AI champions across domains to accelerate experimentation and ownership.

ANECDOTE

Self-Assessment Agent For Reviews

Motive built a Glean agent to create self-assessments by scanning an employee's activity over six months.
The agent compiles contributions, evidence, and prompts reflective questions to guide writing performance reviews.

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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.

Subscribe at⁠ thisnewway.com⁠ to get the step-by-step playbooks, tools, and workflows.