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

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.