From Efficiency to Impossibility: How the Trail Blazers Prove AI Creates Value, Not Just Captures It
David Long had a problem. The Portland Trail Blazers' CMO wanted a Mandarin version of their website, and they needed it quickly. The team's assessment was brutally honest: they didn't have the staff to make it happen and would be stuck waiting on vendor timelines.
David, who had never touched a Shopify store and freely admits he has "no experience with retail," volunteered to try anyway.
The same day he got keys to the Shopify store was the same day he got ChatGPT to solve it. A couple hours later, he had a fully functional website translation that was approved by a native Mandarin speaker.
"It was another moment with AI where I felt superhuman," David later reflected. "We all can be a Swiss Army knife and now I feel like I am one that is so loaded with tools it's a joke."
That story should fundamentally change how every executive thinks about what's possible when constraints disappear.
The False Choice That's Killing Your AI Strategy
Here's where most companies get AI adoption wrong: they're trapped in what I call "value capture" mode—using AI to squeeze 10-15% more efficiency from existing processes. Customer support chatbots. Automated code reviews. Faster content generation.
These applications deliver measurable ROI, but they're essentially defensive moves. And defense alone doesn't put enough points on the board to win.
The real competitive advantage comes from "value creation"—using AI to deliver entirely new capabilities that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive. As NVIDIA's Jensen Huang recently observed: "The real question is, are you a hopeful person, an optimistic person who believes in idea creation, or are you somebody who believes there are no new ideas left and quite frankly we're just working?"
David Long and the Portland Trail Blazers have answered that question decisively. Through a systematic approach to AI implementation, they've moved from basic efficiency gains to business-transforming innovations. And here's the kicker: David isn't a developer, data scientist, or AI engineer. He's a digital marketing professional who happened to get curious about what might be possible.
Meet Your Non-Technical AI Innovator
"I refer to it as a utility," David told me and Matt Abrahams during our recent conversation at SXSW. "It's gonna be the next utility for us. Companies got rid of gas lamps when electricity came along. But the people who really took it to the next level figured out how to use electricity to improve their production lines, improve revenue, improve everything."
David's journey from efficiency to transformation follows what I think of as the 101→201→301 progression:
101: Value Capture (Making Work Faster)
David's first breakthrough was personal—a custom GPT he calls "Betty Budget." Previously, reconciling his monthly credit card across multiple budget codes took 2-3 hours of hunting through spreadsheets. Betty Budget cut that to 30-45 minutes by instantly surfacing the right codes.
Classic value capture: same work, less time.
201: Value Compounding (Making Impossible Work Possible)
Then David built something more sophisticated: "David Detractor" and "Kelly Kindness"—AI tools that analyze post-event survey responses, route feedback to relevant departments, and auto-draft personalized responses.
The numbers are staggering: what used to require 50 hours per week across three departments now takes one person three hours. That's roughly 2,400 hours of labor saved annually—and like Adam's tool at the National Park Service, the real magic happens when individual innovations scale across entire organizations. Even cooler? They went from responding to 60% of comments within three weeks to responding to 100% of comments within 24-48 hours.
My favorite example: A customer complained they couldn't select the vegan hotdog in the Trail Blazers' concession value meal. In the old system, this feedback would have been buried in a spreadsheet, never reaching the right person. With David's AI system, the culinary department was immediately flagged, they changed the menu, and closed the loop with the customer within hours.
That's not just efficiency; it’s a completely different relationship with customer experience.
301: Value Creation (Making Previously Impossible Things Normal)
Here's where David's work enters true value creation territory: solving the secondary market cannibalization problem that plagues every sports organization.
Think about it: if someone can buy a secondary ticket for $10 from a season ticket holder, why would they pay face value of $30 to the team? It's a massive revenue drain that the industry has simply accepted as "the cost of doing business."
David leveraged AI to create—"Vibe Code"—a solution that allows season ticket holders to trade unused tickets for retail or food & beverage credits. The team is beta testing the solution with a limited pilot now, and seeing positive results not only on cannibalized revenues, but also season ticket renewals.
At scale, they expect this program to reduce secondary market postings by 20%. Far from mere incremental innovation, David’s now solving a problem the entire industry thought was unsolvable. Even the NBA is taking notice, asking him to share the innovation with other teams.
The Secret Weapon: Your Organizational Convener
None of this happens without Christa Stout, the Trail Blazers' Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer. While David builds the tools, Christa creates the organizational capacity for innovation to flourish.
Like Cheryl Eckhardt at the National Park Service, Christa understands that the most important AI role has nothing to do with coding—it's about creating space for experimentation and discovery.
Her "Lunch and Launch" sessions are brilliant: gather department teams, ask them to articulate their pain points cathartically ("It sucks that..."), then work collaboratively to build AI solutions. As Christa puts it: "People really enjoy talking about what they hate about their jobs."
But here's what makes Christa exceptional as a convener: she starts with vulnerability. "I think just recognizing that you don't have all the answers and don't need to have all the answers when it comes to AI," she told our SXSW audience. "Literally nobody in the world knows everything about AI. So the idea that you would be expected to is a little crazy."
This isn't just good change management—it's the Dream Weaver role that every organization needs. Someone who creates capacity between having ideas and implementing them.
The Multiplier Effect: When Individual Innovation Becomes Organizational Transformation
Here's what happens when you combine David's building capability with Christa's convening capacity: the tools become viral within the organization.
Billy Brand, David's AI tool trained on the Trail Blazers' complete style guide, used to live in Slack. But people complained they didn't want colleagues seeing them use it—it felt like admitting they didn't know the brand guidelines. So David rebuilt it as a web-based tool, and usage exploded.
One team member complained to David that she "ran out of tokens" using Billy Brand. David's response: "That's the best problem I could ask for."
Meanwhile, other employees started building their own tools without being asked. One team member created software that replaces an expensive existing system—not because it was assigned, but because the organizational culture now celebrates this kind of experimentation.
That's the multiplier effect in action. Individual tools become organizational capabilities. Efficiency gains become cultural transformation.
The Progression Every Organization Should Follow
The Trail Blazers' approach offers a replicable playbook:
Start with Personal Pain Points: Don't begin with strategic initiatives. Begin with "It sucks that..." David's credit card reconciliation wasn't a strategic priority, but solving it sparked his imagination for bigger possibilities.
Find Your Non-Technical Builders: Your best AI innovators probably aren't in IT. They're the people who already turn ideas into action, who get frustrated by inefficient processes, who care enough to iterate until something works.
Create Convening Capacity: Someone needs to create space for discovery, sharing, and celebration. This isn't about mandating AI use—it's about creating forums where people naturally want to share what they've discovered.
Celebrate the Weird Stuff: When someone translates your website into Mandarin as a weekend project, that's not scope creep—that's imagination unleashed. The organizations that celebrate these "useless" experiments are the ones that stumble into breakthrough applications.
Measure Impact, Not Usage: Stop tracking login metrics. Start tracking business problems solved, customer experiences transformed, and revenue opportunities created.
Your Next Move: Stop Capturing, Start Creating
The Trail Blazers prove that value creation isn't just for tech companies with massive R&D budgets. It's available to any organization willing to create capacity for experimentation and imagination.
But it requires a fundamental mindset shift. As Box CEO Aaron Levie puts it: "In most businesses there's a near infinite backlog of this kind of work if you just start to ask the question of 'what if X thing was all of a sudden 100X cheaper or more accessible, what more could you do?'"
That's the question David Long asks every day. It's the question that turned urgent business need into business transformation.
So here's my challenge: Stop reading right now and open ChatGPT. Copy-paste this exact prompt:
"You're an AI implementation expert. I want you to interview me about the most frustrating part of my job so you can suggest three ways AI could eliminate that frustration. Ask me one question at a time."
Then actually do the exercise. As Ethan Mollick told us on Beyond the Prompt, most organizations are forming AI committees that will report back in three months before starting an RFP process to hire consultants who don't know anything either.
The Trail Blazers' transformation started with someone caring enough to try something immediately rather than planning to try something eventually.
Because in David's world, they already have.
Related: 45 Minutes That Saved 20 Years: The Story of An Unlikely AI Hero
Related: Catalyze AI Success: The Power of Dedicated Innovation Capacity
Related: The Most Important AI Role Has Nothing To Do With Code
Related: Beyond the Prompt: Reinventing Recruiting: Anvisha Pai
Related: Beyond the Prompt: Ethan Mollick
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Most companies get AI adoption wrong because they're trapped in "value capture" mode. Efficiency plays might deliver measurable ROI, but they’re essentially defensive moves, and defense alone doesn't put enough points on the board to win. The real competitive advantage comes from "value creation."