Most planning sessions end with a summary. The useful ones end with a challenge.
The challenge here was to turn many different voices into one plan an AI program can act on: a direction, not another meeting to schedule.
What earns continued investment
Sponsors and budget holders commit once, attend one event, and move their budget elsewhere by the third quarter unless they receive something their leadership can justify internally. An AI program keeps its backing when it delivers a framework, not a conversation.
The full roadmap goes deep into execution details. The condensed version has three steps.
The three steps
- Executive AI education. Executive decisions shape everything downstream. Leaders need hands-on time with AI in a setting without judgment, so they can ask the right questions before anyone builds anything.
- A CTO roundtable and white paper. The roundtable centers on "return on experimentation": practitioners' accounts of what their AI pilots taught them. The discussion becomes a concrete document with the participants' names on it.
- An AI readiness scorecard. A benchmark organizations bring back to annual planning, rather than reviewing once. It forces real judgment about readiness, which is the remedy for "AI theater."
A narrative people can trust
One line from the session framed the whole effort: "AI needs its own marketing campaign. Not hype. A narrative people can actually trust."
These three steps are the first draft of that campaign.