Skip to content

AI Strategy#

The AI You Bought Sits Idle. The AI You Didn't Buy Is Everywhere.

SEO phrases: AI adoption, shadow AI, AI governance, change management, adoption-two-halves.

A shrink-wrapped, unused AI terminal on one side of a desk and a swarm of phones and laptops running AI chats on the other. Two halves, one strategy.

Last week I wrote down the five lines I'd want on paper before AI agents start acting inside a company's software. Approved tools, approved accounts, approved systems, an approval line, a log.

That page solves half the problem. The half where people are using AI and you don't know it.

The other half is the one I keep hearing about from owners. They bought the software. They ran the training. Nobody uses it.

Both halves live in the same building. AI adoption isn't a tooling problem. It's a people problem wearing a software costume.

The AI Got More Powerful. Your Controls Need to Catch Up.

SEO phrases: AI governance, AI agent policy, shadow AI, small business AI controls, got-more-powerful-controls-catch-up.

An AI agent working inside business software, with human-set controls around it

Most companies have a rule about what gets installed on a work computer. AI may not trip it. There is nothing to install. Someone opens a browser, logs in, and hands over the job they're tired of doing by hand.

To me, that is the governance problem.

AI That Acts, Needs a Boss

SEO phrases: AI agent governance, small business AI governance, AI agent policy, AI governance checklist, business checklist..

AI that acts needs a boss — an agent without governance is just a liability with an API key.

If an AI system can touch a customer, a refund, or a record, it has a job.

A lot of teams gave it access before they gave it a job description.

AI Use Jumped From 48% to 77%. The Rules Didn't Move.

SEO phrases: small business AI policy, SMB AI governance, AI acceptable use policy, shadow AI, page fix we build with clients..

AI adoption sprinted. The rules never left the starting line.

Between mid-2024 and this January, the share of small businesses using AI regularly jumped from 48% to 77%, per Intuit's May report, built on surveys of more than 34,000 small and midsize business owners. I've watched that curve from the inside, on client engagements and in our own workshops.

Here's the question I've started asking owners: "Can you show me your AI policy?"

Fractional AI Team vs. Point Solutions: What SMBs Actually Need

SEO phrases: fractional AI team, AI implementation SMB, AI governance, workflow automation, SaaS sprawl.

Do you need another AI tool? What SMBs actually need. A business owner overwhelmed at his desk, facing a screen full of AI tools.

Buying another AI tool feels like progress. Most of the time it means you added one more subscription to a workflow that was already messy.

That's the pattern I keep seeing in SMBs right now. The team buys a writing tool, a chatbot tool, a meeting tool, an automation tool, maybe an agent tool on top of that. The demos look sharp. The trial goes well. Then the real business shows up. Data is inconsistent. Nobody owns the workflow. The approvals are fuzzy. The CRM is half-right. The reporting is manual. The tool didn't fail. The operating system around it did.

That's why so many AI investments stall after the excitement phase.

Why Your Domain Expertise Is More Valuable Than Your AI Prompt

SEO phrases: ai for business owners, custom ai systems, ai implementation smb, ai operating systems, domain expertise.

Why Your Domain Expertise Is More Valuable Than Your AI Prompt

Most business owners are quietly paying for software that almost fits their business.

A platform that locks them in. A vendor that ships features they didn't ask for. A line item that climbs every renewal whether the team uses it or not.

Last month, an owner in a room I was in mentioned, almost as an aside, that he'd built his own property management operating system with AI. In seven days. The kind of thing his industry rents from vendors for around $200,000 a year.

The room went quiet.

Only 11% of Companies Are Scaling AI. The Rest Keep Starting Over.

SEO phrases: ai governance, scaling ai, ai implementation, smb, business owners.

Only 11% of Companies Are Scaling AI

You automated a workflow. It worked. Maybe you saved six hours a week on reporting, or cut your meeting prep in half. Your team noticed. You felt the win.

Then you tried to do it again in another department and hit a wall.

That wall is where most businesses get stuck. Not at the start. After the start.