AI Strategy for Companies That Don’t Have a Chief AI Officer

“Enterprise AI strategy” pulls about 720 searches a month, and almost everything written for that term assumes a dedicated AI team, a data science department, and a multi-year roadmap. If you’re running a business in Denver, Boulder, or Golden with no such department, here’s the version of AI strategy that actually applies to you. The Wrong Starting Question Most AI strategy content starts with “what’s your AI vision.” That’s backwards for a small or mid-size business. The right starting question is much narrower: what’s the most expensive, repetitive, checkable problem in your business right now? Checkable matters more than it sounds like it should. If you can’t tell whether an AI system did the task correctly, you shouldn’t hand it that task yet, no matter how impressive the demo looked. The Filter I Actually Use When I’m deciding whether a task is a good first AI project, I run it through three questions: Is the outcome checkable? A call that gets answered, a lead that gets…