Gold for DigiOps: Another Major Award for Capability Building That Works

We are delighted to share another major recognition for a programme we are incredibly proud to have helped bring to life.

Unilever’s DigiOps programme has won Gold in the 2026 Brandon Hall Group™ HCM Excellence Awards®, in the Learning and Development program area, for Best Unique or Innovative Learning and Development Program.

For ParagonInc, this one is particularly meaningful. We partnered with Unilever to design and orchestrate the gamified platform and learner experience behind DigiOps — transforming an ambitious capability programme into an engaging, measurable learning journey at scale.

And this isn't the programme's first major recognition.

Earlier in 2026, DigiOps was named Gartner Power of the Profession™ People Breakthrough of the Year.

Two major industry awards. One capability-building approach.

From 500 people to thousands

The DigiOps journey began in 2025 within Unilever Customer Operations, initially reaching more than 500 colleagues.

The ambition was significant. As AI began rapidly changing how work could be performed, DigiOps set out to equip people with the capabilities required to lead that change — rather than simply react to it.

Participants invested more than 100 hours developing new digital and operational capabilities, including skills spanning AI, prompt engineering, Python, Databricks and Azure.

But this wasn't simply about learning new technology.

The programme was designed to help people understand, experiment with and ultimately apply these capabilities to the way work gets done.

Following the success of the initial programme — and its subsequent recognition by Gartner — the approach was expanded across Unilever's Customer Operations organisation, taking the experience from hundreds of learners to thousands of learners.

That scale matters to us.

It's relatively easy to create an exciting learning experience for 50 people in a room but designing something that can maintain engagement, momentum and a sense of progression across thousands of people, multiple capability areas and an extended transformation journey is a very different challenge.

That's the challenge ParagonInc was built to solve.

Building AI capability people can actually use

AI capability is now high on the agenda for almost every organisation we speak to.

But providing access to AI tools or delivering a few introductory courses isn't the same as creating an AI-capable workforce.

People need opportunities to understand the technology, practise with it, experiment safely, apply it to genuine business problems and progressively build confidence.

That is why the DigiOps approach combines learning with missions, challenges, practical application, live experiences, assignments, recognition and gamification.

The objective isn't simply:

“Have people learned about AI?”

It's:

“Are people becoming capable of using AI to work differently?”

That distinction is increasingly important as organisations move from experimenting with generative AI towards AI agents, automation and increasingly autonomous ways of working.

Why Brandon Hall Group Gold matters

The Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards have been recognising excellence in Human Capital Management for more than 30 years. Entries are independently evaluated by analysts, industry experts and experienced practitioners against criteria including business need, programme design, innovation, adoption and organisational impact.

That makes this particular category especially relevant to what we set out to achieve with DigiOps.

The award isn't simply for delivering learning.

It recognises a unique or innovative Learning and Development programme.

And DigiOps was deliberately designed to feel very different from traditional corporate learning.

Turning learning into a game

Unilever brought the transformation ambition, subject-matter expertise and learning content.

ParagonInc's role was different: we designed the experience around it using our Catalyst Approach.

Rather than presenting learners with a catalogue of courses and asking them to work their way through it, we built DigiOps as an evolving gamified journey.

Campaigns created momentum. Missions turned learning into action. Points, badges, challenges, teams, leaderboards and recognition created reasons to keep coming back. Live experiences, practical assignments and application activities connected learning to the real world.

Behind all of that sat the less visible part: the continuous orchestration required to keep a large learning population engaged over an extended transformation journey.

The objective wasn't gamification for the sake of making learning more fun.

It was to use game mechanics, behavioural design and disciplined programme orchestration to sustain participation long enough for meaningful capability to develop.

First Gartner. Now Brandon Hall Group Gold.

This is perhaps the part we're most proud of.

DigiOps has now received major recognition from two independent organisations, for two complementary aspects of the programme.

Gartner recognised DigiOps with its People Breakthrough of the Year award.

Brandon Hall Group has now awarded DigiOps Gold for Best Unique or Innovative Learning and Development Program.

Brandon Hall Group says its awards recognise programmes demonstrating measurable impact, innovation and execution, with every submission undergoing independent panel review.

For ParagonInc, these awards provide significant validation of the model we have been developing.

We believe capability transformation sits somewhere between learning, behavioural design, technology, game design and programme orchestration.

Great content matters.

Great technology matters.

But neither automatically creates transformation.

The real opportunity is designing an experience that gets people to engage, practise, apply, compete, collaborate — and keep going.

Recognition belongs to the team

The official Brandon Hall Group Gold award is presented to Unilever for DigiOps, and rightly so.

DigiOps exists because of the vision, sponsorship, expertise and enormous commitment of the Unilever DigiOps team, its subject-matter experts, mentors, leaders and learners.

ParagonInc is proud to have been the partner responsible for designing and orchestrating the gamified experience supporting that journey.

And we're even prouder to see an approach that started with hundreds of people become something capable of reaching thousands.

What could your 2027 capability programme become?

Now we're looking for the next challenge.

We're opening a limited number of places for new 2027 capability games using our Catalyst Approach.

If you're currently asking how to get thousands of people genuinely engaged in building AI capability — rather than simply giving them access to another library of AI training — we should talk.

Because we've now seen what happens when learning content is surrounded by an experience deliberately designed to make people participate, practise and progress.

We know it can engage. We know it can scale.

And with recognition from both Gartner and Brandon Hall Group, there is now strong independent validation that the approach can deliver something exceptional.

We're building our 2027 games now. Perhaps the next one should be yours.

From 500 learners to thousands. From Gartner recognition to Brandon Hall Group Gold. Discover how ParagonInc's gamified approach helped turn AI and digital learning into an award-winning capability movement — and why we're now opening our 2027 programme calendar.

Paragon

Turning knowledge into performance.

© 2026. All rights reserved.