VP, AI Strategy & Transformation · Rock Entertainment Group
Georgia Sapounas
I’m an AI transformation leader.
Most companies run AI experiments. I build the system that turns them into capability.
Before AI: a digital marketing executive in sports, leading digital across three Olympic Games and the NBA. Before that, almost a decade on the Canadian National Team.
Rock Entertainment Group · Cleveland Cavaliers · Canadian Olympic Committee · IOC Marketing Seminar · lululemon athletica · BMO
What I actually do
The title says AI strategy. The job is organizational capability.
Strategy and talking about AI alone doesn’t change how people work, but a repeatable system does. A place where ideas get captured, prioritized, built, measured and taught. AI OS is that system, built so experimentation scales instead of staying isolated in whoever happens to be curious.
Strategy & governance
Where AI creates real leverage, and the guardrails that let people move fast without creating risk. Prioritization frameworks, use case pipelines and the executive case for each.
Capability & education
Organization-wide AI literacy for executives, leaders, staff and new hires. Live workshops, prompt libraries and a sharing culture that compounds what one person learns across everyone.
Products & automation
Tools that make the strategy real, built with the departments doing the work: marketing, ticketing, partnerships, content and operations. Not handed to them.
Why it works
AI transformation works better when you have run the business it is changing.
AI OS starts with real use cases, not tools, because I have spent my career inside the work it changes.
Growth & digital marketing
Grew Team Canada's social channels from 200K to 2 million followers. Most social interactions of any National Olympic Committee at PyeongChang 2018. Scaled campaign and paid media efforts to drive Olympic Club membership, and an 800% increase in Olympic.ca visits at Sochi 2014 over London 2012.
Loyalty & CRM
Architect of Cavs Rewards, the first card-linked loyalty platform in major league sports: 21,000+ fans and 4.6M+ consumer transactions after its first year. Earlier, the Canadian Olympic Club, a social-login, gamified fan club that reached nearly half a million members.
Data & customer identity
Cavs ID grew to 125K+ registered fans. A new single sign-on provider and progressive profiling took the average fan profile to 8 unique data points, which powers personalization and lifecycle marketing across CRM, email and SMS.
Content & social
Led all Team Canada content and creative, social and video production for seven years. #WeAreWinter, the most used hashtag of Sochi 2014 after #Sochi2014. 1,600 personalized videos delivered per season inside the Cavs app.
Digital products
GameDay+ and the Cavs app, with an 83% lift in downloads from personalization and automated video. Cavs Gold Pass, one of the NBA's earliest web3 access and loyalty experiences. Olympic.ca, which won three Gold awards.
Partnerships & monetization
$8M+ a year in digital partnership revenue at the Cavs. At the COC, built the branded-content sales strategy and valuation method that brought in over half a million dollars of new revenue in six months. Partners include Coca-Cola, Visa, Samsung, Toyota and RBC.
The flagship
AI OS: an operating system for organizational AI adoption
Built so experimentation scales instead of staying isolated in whoever happened to be curious. Seven components, one loop: teach, capture, prioritize, build, value, repeat.
Opportunities Dashboard
A centralized backlog of AI opportunities, scored on strategic value, feasibility, speed, impact and multiplier effect, and valued as enablement, productivity or growth.
AI Pipeline
Every initiative tracked from idea to validation, build, testing, deployment and measurement. Nothing dies in someone's inbox.
AI Wins
A repository of what worked: problem, solution, impact, time saved, business value, owner and department. Proof beats persuasion.
Idea Submission
Anyone in the building can surface an opportunity. The best use cases come from the people closest to the work.
How We Made It
Documentation of architecture, prompting, workflow and lessons learned, so the second build is faster than the first.
Prompt Library
A growing repository organized by department, role and use case. Institutional knowledge, not personal notebooks.
AI Training Camp
The internal education platform for executives, leaders, staff and new hires, with AI literacy training and an AI Champions program that builds capacity in every department. Capability that arrives with onboarding.
Ideas → systems → products
Every isolated win becomes a documented pattern. Every pattern becomes a product other teams can run without me.
Selected work
Digital at the Olympics, then pro sports
Seven years leading Team Canada’s digital fan experience, then digital products, loyalty, growth marketing and innovation at the Cleveland Cavaliers, and now AI.
Cavs Rewards
The first open-loop, card-linked loyalty program in major league sports. Fans earn points on everyday shopping and redeem them for experiences only the Cavs can offer.
GameDay+ and Cavs digital products
A second-screen app, a loyalty ecosystem and an executive ticket dashboard for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Canadian Olympic Club
The first gamified, social-login fan club for any National Olympic Team. Nearly half a million registered fans.
Speaking
48 stages, one throughline
How organizations actually evolve, told through the Olympic Games and pro sports: from content, to digital experience, to now AI transformation.
IOC Marketing Seminar
Spoke to the marketing leaders of National Olympic Committees on branded content during the Olympic Games and on social platform partnerships that bring new revenue into the business.
Leaders Week: The Ultimate Fan Experience
Spoke at SAP's Data & Analytics Conference about the Canadian Olympic Club and what half a million registered fans taught the team about targeting and personalization, and on the social media valuation of branded content at the PyeongChang 2018 Games.
Twitter's #WinningTheOlympics
Beyond the title
The human behind it all
Systems thinking didn’t start with AI. It started on the ice, at 6am, for the better part of a decade.
Almost a decade on the Canadian National Team
4x National Champion and World Bronze Medallist in synchronized skating. What I believe about coaching, culture, repetition and continuous improvement, I learned there first.
Portraits, florals and bending the rules
One definition of creativity is “characterized by sophisticated bending of the rules or conventions,” and I'm about that life. The first thing I saved up for, at six years old, was a camera.
See the work →
42 countries, most of them solo
Asia, South America, North America, Europe and Australia / Oceania. Let's spread joy, live passionately and take the road less travelled. We gotta live a little while we can.
Wander with me →
Help people play full out
My personal development company. The goal isn't more. The goal is more of you.
Visit Win at Life →Field notes
What’s working in AI transformation, and what quietly isn’t.
Education, frameworks, playbooks and the occasional strong opinion.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Powered by Substack.