In many organizations, the first step toward AI is surprisingly clear.
There is usually a shared sense that something needs to happen. That might mean improving adoption of existing tools, acquiring new capabilities, building a proof of concept, or running a series of targeted experiments. The initial move is rarely the problem.
Where things tend to stall is not at the beginning, but shortly after. The technology works. Early results look promising. And yet, momentum fades. What often gets missed is what that first step is actually meant to achieve.
Too often, early AI initiatives are treated as progress in themselves. A pilot is seen as “doing AI.” An experiment becomes a destination. In practice, those early steps are not the strategy. They are mechanisms to validate the assumptions that would allow a strategy to exist in the first place.
Early AI work should function as a hypothesis test. It should help an organization learn where AI meaningfully changes outcomes, which constraints actually matter, and where the real friction lies. Without that learning being made explicit, the organization accumulates activity but not direction.
This is where AI initiatives frequently drift away from the broader organizational context. AI strategy starts to emerge as a parallel track, loosely connected to existing priorities, operating models, and incentives. In some cases, it becomes a technical roadmap. In others, a collection of innovation projects. In both cases, it remains detached from how decisions are made and how work actually gets done.
Trying to run an AI strategy alongside an organizational strategy is one of the most common failure modes. They do not progress independently for very long. One eventually undermines the other. Either AI remains stuck in experimentation because it never intersects with real ownership and accountability, or organizational priorities override AI efforts because they are perceived as optional or premature.
What tends to work better is convergence. The insights gained from early AI initiatives need to flow directly into broader strategic decisions. Which capabilities are worth scaling. Which processes are ready to change. Which incentives need to be adjusted. Which roles need to own outcomes beyond experimentation. This is not a technical exercise. It is a product and organizational one.
There is no universal recipe for how this convergence should look. Organizations differ widely in culture, structure, and decision-making style. Some move through centralized governance. Others rely on strong domain ownership. Some require heavy alignment upfront, while others progress through controlled decentralization. What “good” looks like is highly context-dependent.
What is consistent, however, is that this step cannot be skipped. Organizations that try to jump from isolated pilots directly to large-scale transformation usually pay for it later, through stalled adoption, fragmented ownership, or growing skepticism about impact. The work of translating early AI learning into strategic and organizational clarity is unavoidable.
Seen this way, the early phase of AI adoption is less about proving that a model works and more about proving where AI belongs. It is about discovering which problems are worth committing to, which trade-offs are acceptable, and which parts of the organization are willing and able to change. Those answers are rarely obvious upfront, but they are essential if AI is to move beyond demonstration and into sustained use.
The organizations that make progress tend to be those that treat early AI initiatives with discipline rather than excitement. They are deliberate about what they are trying to learn. They resist the temptation to scale prematurely. And they recognize that the real work begins not when a pilot succeeds, but when its implications start to challenge existing assumptions.
In that sense, the first step is necessary, but it is never sufficient. It only creates value when it is used to reshape how strategy, ownership, and execution come together. There is no shortcut around that work, and no technology powerful enough to replace it.