Every conversation I have with CIOs and IT leaders right now starts the same way. They're not short on activity. They've got pilots running, tools deployed, teams experimenting. What they don't have is much to show for it. The data backs it up: 92% of companies are ramping AI investment right now. Only 1% consider themselves mature.
Over the last 6–12 months, most IT organizations have gone through the same progression. First, teams were trying to wrap their heads around what was actually useful and what was hype. Meanwhile, boards applied top-down pressure to move quickly. Employees moved faster, adopting whatever made them more productive: coding assistants, chatbots, agents, etc… building small automations for individual tasks and teams. Some of it worked incredibly well. But it also created sprawl.
To regain control, organizations standardized around approved tools such as Claude Code or Microsoft Copilot and rolled them out broadly. And that's where the next challenge emerged. Generating workflows is the easy part. Operating them reliably at scale is much harder. Troubleshooting becomes difficult. Ownership becomes unclear. Maintenance becomes someone else's problem six months later. And eventually, all roads lead back to IT.
So now, security and IT teams are being asked to accelerate adoption while governing an explosion of decentralized workflows and agents they didn't build and can't fully see. The board wants ROI. Employees are running tools nobody approved. And somehow it's your job to govern all of it, often without the budget or mandate to do it properly.
That's the bind that we hear about so often from IT leaders: move faster and stay in control at the same time, for people who don't always appreciate that those two things are in conflict.
What we did to get to 90% intelligent workflow adoption (and what we got wrong first)
I have to be honest: we were making the same mistakes at Tines that we were telling our customers not to make. I wanted to share our experience and what other IT leaders can take from it as they navigate this path themselves.
Last summer, AI was spreading across the company. Teams were building independently. Nobody had full visibility into what existed, what was working, or what it was costing us to maintain. We had plenty of enthusiasm. Operationally, we weren’t there yet.
So we made a decision: In the fall, we created a dedicated Head of Intelligent Workflows role. This was not a committee, not a working group, not something added to someone's existing day-to-day. It was one person, full-time, with clear ownership over how AI and automation get adopted across Tines.
The person we chose was Martin Maroney. Martin was one of the first five people at Tines. He'd spent years on our customer success engineering team, onboarding hundreds of companies onto the platform. He understood the technology and intelligent workflows deeply, but more importantly, he understood the human side of it. He knew what it actually takes to get an organization to change how it thinks about AI. And that’s to tie it to real, tangible value for every employee.
Once that ownership was in place, everything else followed. He implemented a structured intake model so teams could get support without going rogue. This included office hours, a cross-functional workflow council, proper governance, and real review processes. This began to lead to real visibility into what was being built across the company, and the ability to start cleaning up technical debt that had accumulated.
This is where things currently stand six months in:
1,700 workflows built, with 600 active every month.
New workflows created per month went from 19 in January to 56 in April, nearly tripling in four months.
We're now processing 25 to 30 million events every week.
But the stat I’m most impressed by is this: 400 weekly users of intelligent workflows. 90% of the company. Up 25% since December.
Think about that for a second - 90% of Tines employees are actively using workflows we've built internally. This isn't a power-user tool that a handful of technically advanced people rely on. It's become how we work.
A “paved path” approach to unlock AI value at scale
What we learned from this mirrors what we see across the hundreds of organizations using Tines. The ones that get AI and automation to actually scale do it by building the right foundation first.
There’s a concept in engineering called paved paths. It essentially means that the right thing to do should also be the easiest. This is how we must think about AI governance. It doesn’t slow adoption. It's what makes it possible at scale.
IT orgs that think about this in the right way are investing early in ownership, structure, and visibility. They put someone in charge. They build intake processes. They create the conditions for teams to build confidently, without going rogue and without creating technical debt that comes back to bite them later.
You don't skip stages, and you don't get to scale by accident. The governance you put in place early is what determines whether you ever get there.
If you want a more detailed overview of the framework behind this and our Tines x Tines program, including how to think about where AI, automation, and human judgment each belong in your workflows, Tines CEO Eoin Hinchy covered it in his opening keynote at Workflow, our first-ever industry event.
The session is available on demand now. Find it here.