How Motive Uses 1,000+ AI Agents to Boost Productivity by 50% with Maddie Engelmeier

In this episode of This New Way, Aydin sits down with Maddie Engelmeier, AI leader at Motive, to dive deep into how her team is transforming employee productivity with AI. Motive has set an ambitious company-wide goal: boost productivity by 50%. Maddie shares the three-tier strategy behind this initiative, showcases real AI agents in action—from self-assessment tools to executive account summaries—and explains how Motive fosters an AI-native culture across 100,000 customers and 1.3 million drivers. From using Glean to power performance reviews, to leveraging Notebook LM for instant enablement videos, Maddie gives a behind-the-scenes look at how AI is not just saving time but elevating effectiveness across the company. Timestamps 0:00 – Setting the stage: Motive’s ambitious 50% productivity goal 1:04 – Maddie introduces Motive and her role leading AI initiatives 3:12 – The three-tier AI adoption framework (democratization, automation, transformation) 6:51 – Why Motive adopted Glean and how it evolved from search to an agentic platform 8:08 – Demo: Self-assessment agent for performance reviews 13:06 – How Glean pulls from Slack, Drive, Gmail & more to save recall time 15:19 – Probing reflection questions vs. copy-paste AI output 19:02 – Over 1,000 unique runs: thousands of hours saved in one cycle 19:27 – Stakeholder feedback agent explained 21:21 – Shifting from recall to reflection and effectiveness 23:50 – Demo: Executive account summary agent for customer insights 27:55 – Scaling AI internally: AI labs, Genius Bars & Slack communities 31:00 – Why AI is enhancing—not killing—creativity 32:07 – Notebook LM demo: from docs to enablement videos in seconds 35:27 – How weekly “snippets” create accountability and unblock teams 36:00 – Agents growing faster than employees—future of work projections 38:05 – Scaling adoption with big, relevant use cases 39:09 – Maddie’s outlook: building comfort with experimentation and collaboration Tools & Technologies Mentioned Glean – AI-powered enterprise search and agentic workflow builder, securely connected to company data sources. Notebook LM – Google’s AI notebook that now generates enablement videos instantly from documents. Salesforce, Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Confluence – Data sources integrated into Motive’s AI agents for recall and analysis. Subscribe at⁠ thisnewway.com⁠ to get the step-by-step playbooks, tools, and workflows.