FRAMEWORK
The AI Playbook
What an AI practice is actually made of: twenty capabilities, sorted by what you cannot operate without, what is expected of you, and what multiplies the rest.
20
Capabilities
3
Tiers
17
Instruments
1
Industry-agnostic
Most AI strategy decks describe a destination. This describes the organisation that gets you there: the capabilities a company has to actually stand up, in the order that survives contact with a budget cycle. It is anonymised and industry-agnostic, and it is tuned to work at the scale of a mid-market business and at the scale of an enterprise, because the sequence does not change, only the headcount against it.
Each capability carries its own maturity scale, so a leadership team can place itself rather than be told where it is. The seventeen instruments at the end are the working documents: assessments, rubrics, checklists and registries that get used in a room rather than read.
The twenty capabilities
The tiers are the argument. Everything in the first group is load-bearing, and an accelerator built on a missing critical capability is the most expensive mistake in this field.
Critical
You cannot operate without these.
- 01 AI Strategy & Vision
- 02 Center of Excellence
- 03 Use Case Prioritization
- 04 Governance & Policy
- 05 Responsible AI
- 06 Valuation & Measurement
Table stakes
Expected of a functioning AI practice.
- 07 Product Lifecycle
- 08 Build vs. Buy
- 09 Operating Model
- 10 Executive Alignment
- 11 Change Management
- 12 Talent & Hiring
Accelerators
Multiply the impact once the foundation holds.
- 13 AI Literacy & Education
- 14 Community of Practice
- 15 Citizen Development
- 16 Applied R&D
- 17 Data & Agent Architecture
- 18 Infrastructure & Automation
- 19 Cybersecurity
- 20 AI-Curated Data
The instruments
One working document per letter. These are the parts that get filled in, argued over and signed.
- A The AI Readiness Assessment
- B The Use Case Scoring Rubric
- C The AI Registry
- D The Responsible-AI Checklist
- E The Valuation & Look-Back Instrument
- F The Product Lifecycle Reference
- G The Build vs. Buy Framework
- H Executive Literacy & Education
- I AI & the Workforce
- J The Enterprise AI Adoption Hub
- K The Citizen-Dev Guardrails Matrix
- L The Citizen Development Portal
- M AI Agent Reference Architecture
- N The Workload Placement Matrix
- O AI FinOps & Cost Management
- P The AI Card
- Q AI Laws, Regulations & Frameworks
What is not here
The contents. Every capability above sits behind panels of guidance, worked examples and the maturity scale that goes with it, and the instruments are working documents rather than titles. None of that is published, and this page is the structure on purpose: it is enough to judge whether the thinking is sound and not enough to run the programme from.
It is used in advisory engagements today. A hosted version you can work through yourself is being built.
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