AI Adoption Starter Guide for Businesses

A short route into AI for an organisation that has not started yet. It assumes no existing capability and recommends no particular product.

01 — Start with the business

Ask:

• What takes too much time?
• What requires repeated manual work?
• Where do people search through large amounts of information?
• Where are decisions supported by large amounts of data?

02 — Identify suitable opportunities

Look for workflows involving:

• Repetitive processing
• Information extraction
• Classification
• Summarisation
• Knowledge retrieval
• Content generation
• Workflow assistance

03 — Start small

Do not begin by attempting to transform the whole organisation. Select one clearly defined use case, where a mistake is visible and recoverable, and where the people involved will tell you honestly whether it helped.

04 — Keep people involved

Define, before anything runs:

• What the system produces
• Who reviews it
• What requires approval
• What happens when the system is uncertain

05 — Connect the workflow

AI becomes useful when it can reach the systems around the workflow rather than sitting beside them. The usual shape is: data, then the model, then business logic, then the application, then a person.

06 — Evaluate

Measure the outcome against the problem you started with:

• Did the workflow become simpler?
• Did manual effort change?
• Did the quality of the output improve?
• Did people actually adopt it?

Be honest about cost as well: tooling, the engineering around it, and the time spent reviewing output. A system that saves effort in one place and creates review work in another may be a net loss.

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AI adoption is a change to how an organisation works, not a software installation.

Related reading: how businesses can start using AI, and what generative AI is.