Key takeaways
- AI transformation starts with a decision inventory, not tool selection.
- Keep the first pilot narrow: one decision, one team, one measurable win.
- Write governance alongside the pilot; deferred governance blocks scaling.
- One piece of evidence in 90 days is the strongest argument for the next budget.
Why not start with the model?
Model and tool decisions age fast. Whatever you choose today will have a better alternative in six months. An organisation's decision structure, by contrast, changes slowly. So start from the layer that lasts — the decision.
Projects that start with a tool also run into an inevitable question: “where will we use this?” Asked at the end rather than the beginning, it usually has no answer.
How to build a decision inventory
Run short sessions with teams and list decisions with three properties: they repeat often, they take time, and errors are costly. Proposal preparation, request triage, technical document search, candidate screening, stock decisions.
Then score each on two axes: potential benefit and implementation difficulty. Difficulty must include data access, privacy sensitivity and the process owner's willingness.
How to choose the first pilot
The first pilot should not be the one promising the largest benefit but the one most likely to produce evidence. The criteria: data is accessible, the process owner is willing, the result is measurable, and mistakes can be reversed.
Keeping scope narrow is discipline, not weakness. A measurable win in one team on one decision is more persuasive internally than ten presentations.
Do not defer governance
Governance is usually deferred — “let it work first, we will write the rules later.” That deferral stops the project at the scaling stage: legal, audit and information security all arrive at once and the pilot is shelved.
The right approach is a three-to-five page framework written alongside the pilot: usage policy, risk classification, human oversight rules and logging. That document becomes ready ground for every subsequent use case.