How an AI Readiness Survey gave Degordian a clear starting point for AI adoption

About company

Founded in 2009, Degordian is a leading digital-first agency in the Adria region. Over the years, the company has evolved from a single agency into a hub of specialized agencies, with brands including Builtt, Enstring, Boiler, Ahelon, and most recently Copula. Together, these companies bring together expertise across strategy, creativity, technology, data, and performance marketing.

Today, Degordian operates across Zagreb, Belgrade, and Mostar, with more than 120 employees working within a fast-changing industry shaped by constant technological innovation and evolving client expectations.

As artificial intelligence started reshaping the way agencies work, Degordian recognized both the opportunities and challenges it presents. The company wanted to ensure that employees across different teams, disciplines, and agencies felt prepared for this shift and understood how AI could support their work. The focus was not only on introducing new tools, but on creating a shared understanding of AI and building confidence in its everyday use.

The challenge: Knowing where the organization really stands before scaling AI

Artificial intelligence is changing how agencies operate, but employee readiness varies a lot. Some employees actively explore AI tools, while others are more cautious about how AI will affect their roles and responsibilities.

For a small team, adopting AI is mostly a single decision that gets implemented quickly. Across a group of more than 100 people spread over several agencies and units, it becomes something much harder: a question of communication, education, and ultimately culture and mindset. Leadership understood that successful adoption depends not just on access to tools, but on clarity, confidence, and trust in how those tools are used.

The challenge was to get an honest read on where the organization actually stood, across every team, before rolling out AI initiatives. Without that, any effort risked being built on assumptions rather than on how employees really felt.

Our solution

To establish that starting point, Degordian ran an AI Readiness Survey using Luppa. Employees from across the group took part, with results scored across a range of readiness areas covering culture and psychological safety, personal openness, understanding and usage, and the processes and prerequisites needed to use AI at work.

The results gave leadership a clear, evidence-based picture, and it was more nuanced than a single average would suggest:

• Strong readiness overall. On Luppa's readiness map, Degordian's group average sat on the high side for both individual and organizational readiness, in the "ready to accelerate" region of the map. Employees are largely open to AI and the groundwork is in place.
• Wide variation between its own units. That group average hid meaningful differences between Degordian's individual units, some clearly further ahead than others. The segmentation showed leadership exactly which teams needed the most support, rather than treating the whole group as one.
• One clear priority, backed by a number. The lowest-rated item in the entire survey was whether the organization has clear guidelines on when and how to use AI tools at work, scoring just 1.97 out of 5. With many parallel AI initiatives running at once and a fast pace of change, precise guidance simply hadn't kept up. The survey turned a vague sense into a defined, fixable gap.

Together, these findings gave Degordian its "point zero": a shared, factual baseline to build the next phase of its AI transformation on. Instead of guessing how teams felt, leadership now has a clear view of where readiness is strong, where it varies, and the single most important thing to fix first, clear and shared guidelines for using AI at work.

By starting with employee feedback rather than a top-down rollout, Degordian made AI adoption a shared process from the outset, with the organization's real needs, not assumptions, setting the agenda for what comes next.