We found that 46% of our management had never used AI - they had never even seen it. Our goal was to expose people to AI in a way that felt relevant to their daily work.
The FNV is the largest trade union federation in the Netherlands, with one million members and 1,700 staff. It faced a challenge that will feel familiar to many unions: how do you adopt AI responsibly when your organisation has very different levels of digital literacy, genuine political sensitivities about what automation means for workers, and no shared framework for making decisions?
Their answer wasn't to roll out a set of tools and hope for the best. It was to build the organisational conditions for AI to work - starting with culture, governance and genuine learning, not software.
The challenge
FNV identified three internal blockers before they started:
Fragmented experimentation: individual departments were trialling AI tools in silos, creating inconsistent approaches to data security and no shared learning.
Strategic uncertainty: real questions existed inside the union about how time saved by AI should be reinvested - for staff, or for members? This needed honest conversation, not avoidance.
A literacy gap: nearly half of the management team had never directly used an AI tool. You can't govern what you don't understand.
What they did
Rather than launching a single initiative, FNV built five interconnected strands of work. The logic was that technology adoption without culture change doesn't stick - so they invested in both simultaneously.
