Many companies around the world are developing Generative AI technologies and prompts to help employees work faster and be more productive.
But from what we’ve seen, there’s a growing body of data suggesting that these solutions aren’t working as well as companies hope. For example, a recent MIT study shows that 95% of AI initiatives fail to deliver any return on investment.
In our work as innovation consultants across multiple enterprises and industries, we’ve seen that the main reason GenAI initiatives fail is due to low employee adoption.
For most companies, their GenAI adoption strategy boils down to rolling out a training course. But this typically isn’t enough, as it merely offers an introduction to the fundamentals of GenAI. It doesn’t facilitate the adoption of more valued bespoke workflows or agent-style patterns.
Companies with the most productive AI adoption initiatives have systems that enable employees to share how they use AI with others, who can then reuse those insights. Instead of AI hacks staying siloed with one team or individual, they’re adopted across the organisation.
In this article, we share the story of how the firm's innovation team, in partnership with InnovationCast, facilitated the adoption of GenAI at Gowling WLG, an international law firm with 20 offices and over 1,500 employees worldwide.
How Gowling WLG Implemented an AI Prompt Library to Support Organisation-Wide GenAI Adoption
Gowling WLG’s GenAI journey started with focused pilots, which laid the groundwork for a structured, organisation-wide rollout to support day-to-day legal work.
However, after rolling out GenAI, Gowling WLG stakeholders realised they couldn’t easily identify which AI use cases delivered the most value and scale them across teams, departments, or offices. If an employee found an AI hack to improve the speed and quality of their work, they may share it with a few close colleagues, but there was no way to share that with the entire workforce.
Drawing on their innovation management experience, the innovation team recognised that the principles of employee collaboration and co-creation could play a key role in supporting AI knowledge sharing and adoption.
The idea was to create a digital innovation platform where employees could share different ways they use AI in their work processes. Those insights would be available to everyone else in the company. Other employees can see how their colleagues are using AI and adopt it in a similar way, or even collaborate and co-create to find faster, better ways to work with AI.
This would effectively allow Gowling WLG to transform individual AI wins into organisational capabilities.
This is how the Copilot Prompt Library was born.
“The Copilot Prompt Library enables employees to share and search for best practices in Generative AI prompts. It connects legal and operational teams across all locations, fostering collaboration and innovation to develop new ways of using GenAI to transform the way we work.”
– Matt Chapman, Innovation Manager
The Copilot Prompt Library Encourages Employees to Share How They Use GenAI
The Copilot Prompt Library is a repository of best practices for how GenAI can be used, delivered through Gowling WLG’s innovation management platform, CoLab, which runs on InnovationCast.
Here, employees can share how they leverage Copilot’s GenAI prompts to complete specific tasks — using simple explanations, screenshots, and short videos — with those insights visible to the entire company.
Employees can share three types of prompts:
Single-use prompts: These are simple instructions such as “Summarise this document” or “Create a graph from this data.”
Prompt workflows: These are ideas for optimising entire work processes using GenAI. Employees can describe how they completed a task pre-AI and with AI.
AI agents: These are applications that employees develop to automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
To support their scaling and adoption across the organisation, the Gowling WLG innovation team worked with the InnovationCast team to introduce powerful search capabilities for users. That way, when someone wants to learn ways to adopt AI, they can filter by department, office, role, tool, or task, and see all the relevant prompts.
The Prompt Library also allows employees to see which of their colleagues are skilled in AI by viewing their contribution history and messaging them for guidance or support. This connects GenAI-savvy employees with those seeking help. Before the Prompt Library, there was no way for employees across locations and departments to connect.
“You don’t know who can help. You normally ask the person next to you or who you work with regularly. The Copilot Prompt Library changes that. You now have access to all the experts in the organisation. An employee will suddenly see a lawyer in a different practice who is skilled in the GenAI prompts; or they will see the person in the operational team skilled in building AI agents who can advise you on how to take yours forwards.”
– Matt Chapman, Innovation Manager
Employees Can Work with Copilot Prompt Authors to Improve and Fine-Tune the Prompt
It’s important to note that GenAI prompts reflect an employee’s approach to a certain task, which may or may not be the optimal method.
The innovation team was aware of this, so to build a library of the best possible prompts, they wanted employees to be able to co-create with the original prompt author and refine prompts together.
The innovation team, in collaboration with the InnovationCast team, designed the Prompt Library so employees could vote on whether a prompt could help save time or needs improvement.
If they say it needs work, they must provide feedback to improve the prompt. They’re encouraged to team up with the original author to brainstorm and identify more capable prompts that cover all aspects of the task’s variables.
As employees refine prompts together, their conversations are saved in the comment thread for future reference. Authors can also update the main prompt with a new version and communicate it to followers.
The Prompt Library’s emphasis on co-creation improves the quality of prompts by leveraging the expertise of the entire workforce.
“The whole point of the Copilot Prompt Library is to get employees and teams across departments to collaborate and co-create with each other on GenAI adoption. This cross-departmental collaboration is something that is key to us realising scaled and valued outcomes.”
– Matt Chapman, Innovation Manager
Gowling WLG Stakeholders Can Track GenAI Adoption Progress Across the Entire Organisation
One of the main challenges companies face when adopting GenAI is understanding exactly how it’s being used.
Reporting dashboards may show which applications are accessed, when they were last used, and provide an estimated value, but they often lack detail about the specific ways employees interact with GenAI. Managers typically cannot see which prompts or agents staff are using, what data is being entered, or how much time is being saved.
As a result, it becomes difficult to reliably identify high-value prompts or workflows that could be documented, shared, and scaled across the organisation. This is another problem the Prompt Library aimed to address.
In the Prompt Library dashboard, Gowling WLG stakeholders can:
Quickly identify high-impact use cases for GenAI and roll it out across the organisation.
See which departments are advocating GenAI adoption and which are underutilising it, and focus support and training on those needing more assistance. This prevents uneven adoption.
Calculate the return on investment for specific GenAI use cases with greater accuracy. They can see how much time is being saved, which workflows are streamlined, and whether this translates into productivity gains.
Enable the innovation team to highlight and celebrate weekly AI wins on an internal blog within the platform, visible to employees. Matt Chapman — the team's Innovation Manager — has noticed that when employees see how their colleagues save time or improve their workflow with AI, they’re inspired to devote more attention to it.
Results of the Prompt Library
Gowling WLG has developed a host of effective prompts, workflows, and agents since launching the Prompt Library. Here are two examples:
The Lease Check GenAI Prompt Helps Lawyers Identify Problems with Commercial Leases
Developed by a legal colleague, the “Lease Check” prompt reviews and analyses draft commercial leases by comparing them against precedent leases.
This boosts productivity by helping lawyers identify issues faster than they would on their own, flagging hidden exposures, operational constraints, and non-market terms. Importantly, all outputs are verified by the user, ensuring the AI serves as a guide rather than a final authority.
The Red Team GenAI Prompt Helps Assess Project Proposals
Developed by a Business Development project manager, the “Red Team” GenAI prompt is used to critically assess new initiatives or project proposals.
It challenges assumptions, exposes blind spots, and identifies potential flaws, helping users refine proposals for greater success. Verification occurs through iterative feedback and refinement, utilising Copilot’s responses to strengthen the proposal in a structured, conversational manner.
Speaking to Gowling WLG's Innovation Manager, Matt Chapman, about this prompt, he enthused that:
“This GenAI prompt provides an excellent way to strengthen our proposals and verify they engage key stakeholder needs.”
Gowling WLG's Advice for Organisations Looking to Implement Their Own GenAI Prompt Library: 3 Key Takeaways
1. Get the Right Technology Partner in Your Corner
Implementing a GenAI prompt library inside an organisation comes with bureaucracy, politics, and competing priorities. You need the support of an experienced technology partner who listens, understands your challenges, and offers practical, consultative guidance.
You don’t want a partner that hands over a tool with basic technical support, then leaves you to navigate cultural and political barriers post-launch without meaningful guidance.
Matt Chapman shared that with other technology partners, he often feels compelled to rapidly expand his solution expertise after implementation, knowing he’d eventually be left to manage everything on his own. However, we’re pleased to hear that his experience with InnovationCast has been different.
Our approach is to operate as an integrated team, offering guidance, strategic input, and suggestions for better ways to use the platform, so no one is left navigating challenges alone.
2. Consider a Platform’s Usability for Building and Managing Configurations, Not Just the User Experience
When building the Copilot Prompt Library, Gowling WLG's innovation team evaluated two other options:
An off-the-shelf solution for storing and organising GenAI prompts
A custom solution being developed using Microsoft Power Apps
Having already used InnovationCast successfully for Innovation Challenges, the team quickly recognised how easily the platform could be adapted to support a Copilot Prompt Library. Confident in its ability to support this use case, they delivered a working prototype in just two days for demonstration and testing.
The prototype impressed key stakeholders. Through ongoing refinement and feature enhancements from the InnovationCast team, it was established as the leading solution — primarily due to its ease of configuration and adaptability to organisational requirements.
3. The Importance of Communications and Rewards
Another key to successfully implementing a GenAI Prompt Library is designing an engaging communications and rewards plan. Legal organisations are complex, with many competing priorities, and client work naturally commands lawyers’ attention. A multi-channel communications plan, supported by rewards, was essential to create the awareness and interest needed to drive engagement with the Prompt Library.
The innovation team launched the Prompt Library using a multi-channel approach, including email, the intranet homepage, and Gowling WLG's quarterly in-house magazine, inviting colleagues to share their own GenAI prompts.
The launch generated strong initial interest. Follow-up communications through leadership emails, champion networks, and even desktop wallpaper promotions helped engagement build steadily over the following weeks.
Matt Chapman found this to be one of the most rewarding aspects of the Copilot Prompt Library, as it helped surface a champion network and, in turn, provided real, live use-case examples for others to adopt.
"I've found that one of the biggest hurdles to wider adoption in my team has been a lack of practical and useful examples that will work for fee earners. This competition is fantastic for a number of reasons, one of which is giving me an array of practical use cases for them to consider — ones that they should be able to replicate.”
– Ian Curry Chapman, Gowling WLG Knowledge Lawyer
Support a Productive GenAI Adoption Program Within Your Organisation Using InnovationCast
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