Skip to main content
How I AI

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

42 min episode · 2 min read
·
John Kim

Episode

42 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Startups, Fundraising & VC

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Quest Marketplace: Build an internal platform where any employee can post an automation request as a "quest," and any colleague — engineer or not — can claim and build it. Sendbird tracks each quest's estimated weekly hours saved and data risk level, creating a parallel AI roadmap that bypasses traditional sprint prioritization entirely.
  • Token Leaderboard: Measure AI adoption by tracking daily token consumption per employee across five tiers — beginner, intermediate, expert, architect, catalyst, and AI god (100M+ tokens/day). Managers use tier data to tailor enablement, not performance reviews. Sendbird's CTO and co-founder rank among the top consumers, signaling organizational expectations from the top down.
  • Pre-Vetted App Templates: Remove the security barrier for non-technical builders by providing a single app template with authentication, environment setup, and compliance pre-built. Marketers and salespeople extract the template, build their idea on top, and deploy without touching infrastructure — Sendbird's marketing team shipped a full Stripe-integrated swag store in one to two days.
  • Skills Marketplace: Create a shared internal library of reusable AI plugins and skills organized by function — sales, recruiting, design. Sendbird encodes frameworks like MEDDIC into downloadable advisor skills. This prevents duplicate builds across teams and accelerates onboarding by letting employees plug proven workflows directly into their own tools rather than starting from scratch.
  • Hiring for Curiosity Over Credentials: Rewrite job descriptions for AI-first roles to lower tenure requirements and prioritize high curiosity, high agency, and high energy. Sendbird identifies these people inside existing teams first, gives them public visibility — Wednesday all-hands demos — and lets peer-to-peer showcasing drive organic adoption faster than any top-down mandate.

What It Covers

Sendbird CEO John Kim demonstrates how his company built an internal AI adoption platform featuring a quest-based automation marketplace, a skills library, a five-tier token consumption leaderboard, and pre-vetted app templates — transforming non-engineers into autonomous builders without touching the core product roadmap.

Key Questions Answered

  • Quest Marketplace: Build an internal platform where any employee can post an automation request as a "quest," and any colleague — engineer or not — can claim and build it. Sendbird tracks each quest's estimated weekly hours saved and data risk level, creating a parallel AI roadmap that bypasses traditional sprint prioritization entirely.
  • Token Leaderboard: Measure AI adoption by tracking daily token consumption per employee across five tiers — beginner, intermediate, expert, architect, catalyst, and AI god (100M+ tokens/day). Managers use tier data to tailor enablement, not performance reviews. Sendbird's CTO and co-founder rank among the top consumers, signaling organizational expectations from the top down.
  • Pre-Vetted App Templates: Remove the security barrier for non-technical builders by providing a single app template with authentication, environment setup, and compliance pre-built. Marketers and salespeople extract the template, build their idea on top, and deploy without touching infrastructure — Sendbird's marketing team shipped a full Stripe-integrated swag store in one to two days.
  • Skills Marketplace: Create a shared internal library of reusable AI plugins and skills organized by function — sales, recruiting, design. Sendbird encodes frameworks like MEDDIC into downloadable advisor skills. This prevents duplicate builds across teams and accelerates onboarding by letting employees plug proven workflows directly into their own tools rather than starting from scratch.
  • Hiring for Curiosity Over Credentials: Rewrite job descriptions for AI-first roles to lower tenure requirements and prioritize high curiosity, high agency, and high energy. Sendbird identifies these people inside existing teams first, gives them public visibility — Wednesday all-hands demos — and lets peer-to-peer showcasing drive organic adoption faster than any top-down mandate.

Notable Moment

Kim revealed he tracks whether AI token usage curves are smooth across weekends and holidays — not to penalize vacations, but because a flat curve signals AI agents are working autonomously around the clock, which is the actual target state for an AI-first organization.

Know someone who'd find this useful?

Episode Transcript

Unleashing this power of AI and giving it to the power of marketers, salespeople, you get all these cool ideas that get rolled out rapidly to the market. It's taking someone's super creativity and giving them powers to deliver it to your customers. 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. Basically, a marketplace of AI needs and AI builders inside your company where anybody can just pop in and say, oh, I think I know how to do that. So tell me a little bit about this dashboard. So what you're seeing here is the overall usage of our token at the company level. We measure AI gauze as somebody who spend more than a 100,000,000 tokens a day. What I love about this moment is I think it is just such a moment to learn things you could never learn before because the best teacher with the most in-depth knowledge and an endless willingness to go do research is right there at your fingertips. This is like a beautiful time to fail forward and still get up and run faster than the other. Because innovation doesn't start from a pure theoretical structures. It start with people who have that energy and the story behind them. So find them. They're always in your organization, and they really build energy around that. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have John Kim, founder and CEO of Sendbird, and he show us his AI token consumption leaderboard where everyone in the company is ranked from AI newbie to AI god. He's also gonna show us how AI quest can be the key to company wide adoption. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using Work OS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders @workos.com. …

Get the full transcript (8,141 words) + summary by email — free

One-time email with the complete transcript and AI summary of this episode. No account needed.

One email, no spam. We’ll also show you what SignalCast does.

Browse all How I AI transcripts →

You just read a 3-minute summary of a 39-minute episode.

Get How I AI summarized like this every Monday — plus up to 2 more podcasts, free.

Pick Your Podcasts — Free

Keep Reading

More from How I AI

We summarize every new episode. Want them in your inbox?

Similar Episodes

Related episodes from other podcasts

Explore Related Topics

This podcast is featured in Best AI Podcasts (2026) — ranked and reviewed with AI summaries.

Read this week's Startups & Product Podcast Insights — cross-podcast analysis updated weekly.

You're clearly into How I AI.

Every Monday, we deliver AI summaries of the latest episodes from How I AI and 192+ other podcasts. Free for one show.

Start My Monday Digest

No credit card · Unsubscribe anytime