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A Leader's Guide to AI Adoption

When AI Becomes Your Responsibility

How business leaders can guide adoption, protect trust and prove value without becoming technologists

Somebody has made you accountable for AI - for a team, a function, or a whole firm. You may be an excellent leader and still feel unprepared for this particular job. That is not a personal failing. You have been asked to guide people through a technical revolution while the capabilities, the rules and the expectations keep moving.

Licences are not adoption. Adoption is not transformation. Somewhere in your organisation right now, a workflow you are accountable for is stuck in one of those two gaps. This book shows you which one, then walks you through the decisions that close it - sorted into the ones you make, the ones you sponsor, and the ones you escalate - until one team's work has demonstrably changed.

Coming soon

One email when it publishes. No sequence, no newsletter.

When AI Becomes Your Responsibility book cover (beta draft)

What's inside

  • See the real problem: tell the two gaps apart - licences that are not adoption, adoption that is not transformation - and find which one your workflow is stuck in, using the Three Circles.
  • Lead credibly: reach the Leadership Literacy Floor, the minimum understanding below which you cannot judge a claim, choose a workflow or sponsor the work. Then sort the decisions into the ones you make, the ones you sponsor and the ones you escalate.
  • Take a concern apart before you answer it, rather than calling every hesitation resistance. A test that ends in a no is a legitimate result.
  • Change one workflow: choose where AI belongs by risk, fit and the cost of checking, fit guardrails to the setting, and measure changed work in a number that already existed.

Who this is for

Leaders who have been made accountable for AI - for a team, a function or a whole firm. It assumes no technical background and does not need you to have one. It is written for the leader who is expected to raise adoption on a platform they did not choose, and to talk about productivity to people who hear that word and quietly wonder about their jobs.

One boundary. This is about the general-purpose AI your people can already reach - drafting, documents, analysis, reporting, the everyday knowledge work of a business. It is not a guide to machine vision, factory automation, medical devices or building your own models, and it is not a hands-on tutorial in using the tools yourself.

What to read next

An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Using AI

Chapter 5 asks you to build your own fluency. If you are starting from nothing, start here.
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Use AI, Stay Human

The working professional's version of the same skill - how to use these tools on real work without sounding like everybody else.
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Want hands-on help applying this?

Let's turn this into results for your business

  • A short call about where you are and what you want to do with AI
  • A clear view of the fastest path from book to results in your team
  • If we're not a fit, I'll point you somewhere useful
Alastair McDermott

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