Artificial intelligence is advancing at a speed that forces companies to continually review their decisions. Tools, models and capabilities that just a few weeks ago required complex development can suddenly appear resolved by a new solution, even open source. In this context, implementing AI is no longer just about choosing technology, but requires learning to live with permanent change and turn it into a real business capability.
With that conviction, h&k has launched hikaIA, an internal transformation program with artificial intelligence to which it allocates 15% of its annual income and which uses the organization itself as a real environment for experimentation, learning and adoption.
The company tests the methodology at home that it then transfers to its clients, first facing the technological, organizational and cultural obstacles that arise when AI truly enters a company’s processes.
HikaIA starts from a simple idea: a transformation of this magnitude cannot be accompanied solely from theory or from a succession of proofs of concept. You have to walk the path, accept your mistakes, measure the results and learn to make decisions in a scenario that changes every week. Each internal advance thus becomes knowledge applicable to client projects and a way to anticipate risks, unnecessary investments and frustrations.
According to Carlos Cuadrado, general director of h&k, «hikaIA was not born to build agents. Born to build knowledge. Every success, every mistake and every decision we make within our organization helps us better understand how artificial intelligence should be implemented in a real company. “This experience allows us to accompany our clients with an advantage that is not obtained in a demonstration: having traveled the path before.”
A continuous training program
The company conceives hikaIA as a permanent transformation program. Its purpose is to develop the ability to observe, experiment, prioritize and adapt to the pace of technology and continuously transform the business. This discipline forces us to review hypotheses, abandon solutions when they are no longer adequate, and quickly take advantage of capabilities that did not exist when the project began.
Experience is showing that the main difficulty does not necessarily lie in developing a more or less complicated agent. The most demanding challenges appear before and after: identifying a relevant problem, involving the business, preparing the data, redefining processes, changing habits, establishing governance criteria, measuring the impact and accompanying people to incorporate AI into their work in a more appropriate and efficient way at each technological moment.
Therefore, HikaIA does not limit itself to deploying technology. It is a constant and recurring work of definition and adoption. It requires maintaining a close relationship with teams, detecting inappropriate uses, adjusting expectations, and ensuring that artificial intelligence is integrated into the organization with purpose, control, and continuity.
“AI forces us to transform processes, data, systems and ways of working, but we cannot use a classic project approach that begins and ends: the transformation with AI must be continuous. We decided to live this transformation within h&k to learn in a real environment, understand where the difficulties appear and prevent our clients from having to follow that path blindly,” highlights Javier Tejada, co-president and head of technology at h&k.
A living methodology, not a closed recipe
HikaIA is articulated in four levels: personal AI, focused on tools and training to improve individual productivity; Business Agents, aimed at automating departmental processes; Enterprise AI, incorporating advanced capabilities such as the Ariadna agentic software engineering platform, which has completely transformed the business and operating model of application development and maintenance services at h&k; and a cross-layer of governance and security to ensure controlled and responsible adoption.
From this framework, h&k works on four dimensions that must advance in a coordinated manner: technology; definition and management of demand; development and adoption; and AI governance. The methodology evolves with each case implemented, because its value is not in offering a rigid sequence of steps, but in providing criteria to decide what to do, what not to do yet and when to rethink an investment.
One of the central learnings of the program is that technological speed changes the rules of planning. A solution a team has worked on for weeks can be simplified by a new capability that solves the same problem in minutes. Instead of interpreting this change as a failure, hikaIA incorporates it as part of the process: learning to detect when to persevere, when to adapt and when to substitute is an essential competence for any company that wants to use AI in a sustainable way.
Back Office Orchestrator that automates tasks
The first cases put into production already reflect measurable improvements in productivity, operational efficiency and information quality. In the commercial area, an intelligent assistant that integrates information from CRM, SharePoint, Work IQ and other corporate sources has made it possible to achieve savings of more than 12% per week per professional, facilitating the preparation of meetings, the analysis of opportunities and the preparation of proposals.
In the administrative area, h&k has developed a Back Office Orchestrator that automates the validation of commercial opportunities before their transfer to support teams. Since its launch, around 55% of the cases analyzed have been processed correctly from the first moment, while in approximately 36% pending information has been detected that could have been managed in advance.
Internal adoption is another of the program’s pillars. h&k has defined a corporate AI Stack that adapts the tools to the different roles and needs of the company. Based primarily on the Microsoft ecosystem, this framework assigns each profile its own AI kit – with solutions such as Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Analyst, Researcher, Cowork and GitHub Copilot – and establishes clear criteria for when and how to use them. In this way, the organization promotes an integrated, secure and responsible use of artificial intelligence, protecting the information of h&k and its clients within the corporate environment.
These results allow us to validate specific advances, but do not constitute the main thesis of HikaIA. Agents will evolve, better technologies will appear and some developments will be replaced. The asset that remains is the acquired ability to transform a business need into an AI initiative governed, measurable and adopted by people.
Experience as a competitive advantage
With hikaIA, h&k turns its internal transformation into an advantage for its clients. Each difficulty resolved within the company expands your knowledge of how to address the next one; Each error allows us to recognize a risk signal sooner; and each discovery improves the criteria with which new initiatives are prioritized and designed.
This continuous learning prepares h&k to accompany organizations beyond the initial implementation. Because corporate adoption of AI requires being close to the business, regularly reviewing uses, strengthening governance, and helping teams evolve at the same pace as the technology.
h&k works on four dimensions that must advance in a coordinated manner: technology, definition and management of demand, development and adoption
HikaIA was born from the union between h&k and ‘hikari’, a Japanese word that means light. The name expresses the programme’s ambition: to provide clarity in an environment marked by speed, uncertainty and complexity, and to convert the experience gained into better decisions for clients.
In a market where access to technology is rapidly democratizing, the difference will not only be in having artificial intelligence tools. It will be about having developed the necessary discipline to use them judiciously, integrate them into the business and learn continuously. That is the path that h&k has decided to take first.
“The most valuable thing about hikaIA is not a specific technology, but the training involved in implementing AI in our own organization. We are learning at the same speed that technology evolves and converting that learning into safer, faster and more useful decisions for our clients,” concludes Carlos Cuadrado, general director of h&k.
