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Quests, token leaderboards, and a skills marketplace: The elite AI adoption playbook | John Kim (Sendbird)

May 6, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Sendbird CEO John Kim has turned AI adoption into a product. His company built an internal platform where any employee can request an AI tool (a "quest"), earn experience points, and climb a token-consumption leaderboard from "AI Newbie" to "AI God." The result: a marketing team that built a fully functional swag store with Stripe integration and a Konami code Easter egg—without any engineering support. Kim argues that the real value of AI isn't just speed, but enabling teams to build delightful, customized solutions that would never survive a traditional sprint prioritization.

The quest marketplace: turning AI needs into a company-wide game

Kim's central innovation is the "Automators Platform," an internal marketplace where anyone can raise their hand and create a quest. A finance team member might request an accounts receivable automation; an engineer or AI-enabled colleague can then pick up that quest and build it. The platform surfaces key metadata for each quest—weeks saved, risk assessment, and the team that benefits—making it easy for builders to find high-impact, low-risk projects.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:00) **Opening: AI as a Creative Unleashing** - John Kim frames AI adoption as giving marketing, sales, and other teams the power to roll out creative ideas rapidly, moving beyond just doing "more with less."
  • 2 (03:13) **The Ambition: Becoming an AI-First Company** - John defines AI-first as treating AI as part of the workforce, not just a tool, and empowering people with the right information and tools to harness its power.
  • 3 (04:09) **The Swag Store: Marketing Builds Without Engineering** - John demos "Pigas Energy," a swag store built entirely by the marketing team using AI, complete with Stripe integration and a Konami code Easter egg.
  • 4 (08:18) **The Automators Platform: Quests and the Internal Marketplace** - John reveals the internal platform "The Automators," where anyone can raise their hand and create a "quest" for an AI automation or tool.
  • 5 (10:51) **The Mechanics of the Quest System** - Claire breaks down the powerful design choices in the quest system, including risk assessment, weeks saved, and the beneficiary of each automation.
  • 6 (13:10) **Gamification and Recognition** - Completing quests earns experience points, which can be redeemed for gift cards, executive time, or a chance to present at the weekly company stand-up.
  • 7 (14:51) **The AI Engineer for Internal Operations** - John describes a dedicated team reporting directly to him and his chief of staff, responsible for accelerating AI transformation across the company.

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Show Notes

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

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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

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