Every week brings another headline. New model. Best performance on some benchmark you've never heard of. Entry-level jobs disappearing. All jobs disappearing. Your vendors are all pitching AI features. Your board is asking what your AI strategy is. Your team is either quietly using tools you don't know about, or waiting for someone to tell them what's allowed.
And it cuts both ways. You're worried about falling behind, making the wrong call, or exposing the business to risks you don't fully understand. Your staff are worried that adopting AI means automating themselves out of a job. Their incentives say: don't adopt. Or if they are using AI tools — to get on top of their workload, to stay competitive, to keep up — they're doing it in the shadows because they're worried about top-down pushback or drawing attention to the fact that their role might be automatable.
That means you're likely already exposed. AI is being used in your business right now — you just don't have visibility over where, how, or what data is flowing through it.
You're responsible for getting this right — for your organisation, your people, your competitive position. But you don't have a trusted, vendor-neutral source of truth. Analysts are expensive and generic. Your internal teams have an agenda. Your vendors definitely have one.
Most of the noise is just that. But some of it genuinely matters. Knowing which is which is the job.