Six cards. Title, who it is for, and a short teaser. Full pieces will be written in Scott’s voice later — these are not the articles.
For owners and sales or ops leaders asked to “do something with AI.”
Start with a painful, frequent process that already has data and a person who can catch a bad answer. Not a vendor demo, and not a company-wide chatbot.
For whoever owns the customer relationship management system (CRM), shared drives, or support desk.
You do not need a data lake to start. You need a source of truth for one process: fields people actually fill in, documents someone still maintains, and a clear list of what must not go into a public tool.
For owners and anyone who wears the unofficial IT or security hat.
Shadow AI means staff using personal ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, notetakers, or browser extensions without IT approval. A ban usually fails. A sanctioned seat plus a “never paste” list is the grown-up answer.
For owners and finance-minded operators who have to defend a spend.
Write down the old time, error rate, or cycle time this week. Then count license, setup, training, review, and usage — not vanity seat counts.
For team leads and the internal champion who is not in IT.
Training has to happen inside the real workflow — the quote, the ticket, the weekly report. Appoint helpers as champions, not hobbyists who chase features.
For owners about to sign a vendor order who want a list they can act on.
The real risks: customer data leaving on a personal account, confident wrong answers used as fact, and nobody named when it breaks. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) frame — Govern, Map, Measure, Manage — in shop-floor language.