If you want to adopt AI in your enterprise, you are probably asking some basic questions about how to do it. Here are my answers.

  • Who should I hire to help me use AI? If at all possible, in-source your AI team. Don’t hire a VP of AI. Don’t shove AI onto your CTO or even CDO’s plate. Promote your sharpest, most motivated generalist into a Director of AI role and give them a TON of executive support. Let them pick their team and set their own success criteria, at least for the first 6-12 months.

  • What AI should I use? Don’t bother with AI that’s baked into productivity suites, that’s largely a distraction from the real wins. Use foundation models and coding models first. Don’t spend any amount of time in an AI bake-off. Features and functions will change before you can review your findings. Make a fast decision, and don’t commit to any contract longer than 12 months. Ideally, don’t commit to any contract at all.

  • When should I start using AI? Now. Start now. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know where to put AI in your organization yet, you need a team focused on building the muscle to manage and improve this new thing. The longer you take to start, the farther behind you will be when you finally do.

  • Where should I use AI? Focus on helping your devs improve their inner loop first. This is hands-down the most bang for your AI buck. Then expand into other operational roles and functions: anywhere you have to ingest documents, anywhere you have to reason over data that’s mostly stranded in Excel or Google Sheets, anyone whose job is primarily about knowing where things are– get them an AI immediately, so it can learn from and help them.

  • How should I use AI? Build a Center of Excellence. Keep it incredibly small, like five people max. Staff it not with data engineers and data scientists but with outgoing, problem-solving generalists. Make sure they’re people people.

Remember, there are plenty of ways you can improve productivity and hardly any of them rhyme with “agentic AI.” Your biggest wins with AI, today, will be using it to help streamline YOUR business processes, not trying to adopt some other company’s unwieldy, fresh-out-of-beta agentic “platform.”

If you don’t have a team that’s already familiar with managing adoption and change in YOUR company, you are not ready for AI agents. Build that team, build that muscle, and then you can start to evolve.