Nazaré wins three Silver Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards

Nazaré and Inizio Engage XD have won three Silver awards at the 2026 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards for the AI Academy, recognising its impact on employee upskilling, blended learning and business performance.

The programme was awarded Silver for:

• Best Program for Upskilling Employees
• Best Use of a Blended Learning Program
• Best Results of a Learning Program

Together, the three awards recognise the full story of the AI Academy, from identifying a genuine capability challenge, to designing an engaging learning experience, to delivering measurable changes in confidence, adoption and performance.

Moving AI from theory into everyday work

The AI Academy was designed and delivered by Nazaré for Inizio Engage XD to build practical AI capability across a global workforce of more than 700 people.

The challenge was not simply awareness. More than half of employees were not yet embedding GenAI into their day-to-day roles, despite a strong appetite to do so. Confidence was uneven, usage was inconsistent and many people were self-teaching, creating growing capability gaps across teams.

The Academy was designed to change that by moving beyond traditional, theory-led training and focusing instead on practical application.

Three targeted pathways, Learn, Explore and Speak, combined self-directed learning, cohort-based practice, live workshops, peer learning and AI-powered simulations. Each pathway played a different role, from building foundational skills, to developing real business use cases, to helping leaders confidently articulate the value of AI.

The result was a nine-week learning experience built around a simple principle: people build capability by putting learning into practice.

From learning to measurable impact

That approach delivered a significant shift in both confidence and behaviour.

Confidence using GenAI increased from 60% to 88%, while perceived capability increased from 62% to 88%. The proportion of employees identifying as Active/Activated or Advocate/Enabler also increased from 35% to 82%.

Participants in the Explore pathway also demonstrated significantly higher engagement with enterprise AI platforms, including 2.7x more messages sent, 3x more agents engaged and 3.6x more AI tools employed.

Crucially, the programme translated learning into tangible business outputs. Teams created 44 real-world AI business use cases across service lines, while 50 employees built and showcased new AI-enabled workflows.

These results are what make the three Brandon Hall Group awards particularly significant. The recognition is not just for the learning experience itself, but for the impact it had on how people work.

The AI Academy helped move AI from individual experimentation towards more confident, consistent and practical adoption across the organisation. It built capability, strengthened collaboration and created a scalable model for helping people use emerging technology effectively in their everyday roles.

Read the full AI Academy case study: Supercharging AI adoption across teams.

Winning three Silver Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards is strong recognition of what can happen when learning is designed around real behaviour, real work and measurable outcomes.