The 60-90 Day Plan Nobody Gives You When AI Adoption Goes Wide
For the leader who has a handful of teams using AI well and twenty teams wondering when it is their turn.
The message arrived on a Wednesday morning.
“We need to scale this. Leadership wants all 20 teams on AI tooling by end of quarter.”
I had seen this moment coming. The early adopter teams had been running for three months. The metrics were moving. A few people were genuinely excited. And now the machine wanted to replicate it everywhere, at speed, without asking whether everywhere was ready.
I put my coffee down and looked at the screen for a moment.
This is the part nobody writes the playbook for.
Not the early adoption. Not the proof of concept. The moment between “it works for a few” and “it works for everyone” is where most AI rollouts quietly fall apart. Not dramatically. Quietly. Teams adopt the tools without the foundations to use them well. Metrics get created that measure activity instead of outcomes. Engineers who were genuinely curious become people going through motions. The culture of experimentation that produced the early wins gets replaced by a mandate to demonstrate compliance.
This post is the playbook I wish someone had handed me.
Not a consultancy document. Not a framework with sixteen boxes. The actual sequence of decisions, in the order they need to happen, with the reasoning behind each one.
Start With What Good Actually Looks Like
Before you do anything else, before you send a single calendar invite or set up a single training session, you need to answer one question clearly.
