Overview
Most organizations do not lack AI activity; they lack AI strategy. Pilots multiply, vendors pitch, and boards ask pointed questions, but few executives can say clearly where AI will create value for their business, in what order, and at what risk. The hard part is not choosing a tool. It is making a small number of well-sequenced bets that fit your data, your people, and your appetite for risk, and then leading the organization through them.
This is a hands-on, practitioner course. It follows a deliberate gradient: first see AI capability clearly and without hype, then find where it creates value in your specific business, then assess whether your organization can actually execute, and only then build the roadmap, guardrails, and measures. It goes deep on that sequence rather than surveying every AI trend, because a focused strategy an executive can defend beats a broad one no one owns. Every module includes a hands-on lab and builds on the one before.
Who Should Attend
- Executives and senior leaders accountable for an organization's AI direction
- Strategy, transformation, and innovation leaders building the AI roadmap
- Business-unit leaders who must translate enterprise AI ambitions into plans
Leaders who first need a grounding in what AI is should start with AI Fundamentals for Business Leaders.
Prerequisites
- Working familiarity with AI concepts at the level of AI Fundamentals for Business Leaders or Generative AI for Business Leaders
- Responsibility for, or meaningful influence over, strategic decisions in your organization
What You Will Learn
- Judge AI capability claims and separate durable capability from hype
- Identify and prioritize where AI creates real value in your business
- Assess organizational readiness across data, talent, technology, and culture
- Build a sequenced AI roadmap with honest build, buy, or partner decisions
- Define risk appetite and governance guardrails at the strategy level
- Lead the change and measure whether the strategy is actually working
Course Outline
Day one: seeing clearly and finding the value
- The Executive's View of AI
- What AI genuinely does well today, and where the frontier actually is
- Reading past vendor claims and headlines: a working filter for hype
- Lab: score a set of real AI announcements and vendor pitches for substance versus noise
- Where AI Creates Value in Your Business
- The value levers: cost, revenue, speed, quality, and risk reduction
- Building a use-case portfolio instead of chasing isolated pilots
- Lab: build a first-pass AI opportunity map for your own organization
- Assessing Readiness
- Data readiness: the unglamorous foundation most strategies skip
- Talent, technology estate, and culture as constraints on ambition
- Lab: complete a readiness assessment for your organization and identify the binding constraint
Day two: building and leading the strategy
- Prioritizing and Building the Roadmap
- Sequencing bets: quick wins, capability builders, and long plays
- Build, buy, or partner, and the honest tradeoffs of each
- Lab: turn your opportunity map into a sequenced twelve-month roadmap
- Risk and Guardrails at the Strategy Level
- Defining risk appetite: what your organization will and will not do with AI
- Governance as part of strategy, with a pointer to AI Governance for Leaders for building the machinery
- Lab: write a risk-appetite statement and the top five guardrails for your roadmap
- Leading the Change and Measuring Results
- The operating model: who owns AI, funds it, and delivers it
- Metrics that show value, not just activity, and when to kill a pilot
- Lab: draft a one-page, board-ready AI strategy brief and present it to the group
Extended Version
The three-day version keeps the same gradient and adds depth and practice:
- Deeper financial modeling of AI investments: cost structures, ROI cases, and pilot economics
- Organizational design for AI: centers of excellence, federated models, and talent strategy
- A working session on the people side of the strategy, connecting to Leading and Building AI-Powered Teams
- A capstone in which each executive presents a complete AI strategy for their organization and defends it under questioning