How to Lead AI Adoption in Your Business

Author, Chad Haldeman, is a Senior Business Advisor with The Resultants.

To learn more about Steve, visit our Team Page or connect with him on LinkedIn.

There's a conversation happening in nearly every company right now, and it sounds something like this: "We should probably be doing more with AI."

That's usually where it stalls.

AI gets treated as a side project. Something for IT to evaluate, something individual employees experiment with on their own, something that lives in a vague category of "we should look into that."

Gallup's research confirms what we're seeing on the ground: the biggest factor separating organizations that successfully adopt AI from those that don't isn't access to tools, it's leadership.

Employees are far more likely to use AI when managers actively encourage it, connect it to real work, and model its use themselves.

If your business already runs on a clear plan, strong people practices, and a disciplined execution rhythm, you have the structure AI needs. Now you have to lead it.

Here are some ideas about what that looks like across the three components of a healthy Business Operating System.

Plan: Connect AI to Your Strategy, Not Just Your To-Do List

Without strategic clarity, teams either try to use AI for everything and get overwhelmed, or they default to whatever's easiest to automate and miss the real opportunity.

The leadership teams making the most progress with AI adoption are the ones who connect it to where the business is going, not just where it is today.

They aren't asking "what can AI do?" They're asking "what are we trying to accomplish, and how could AI get us there faster?"

This might mean using AI to research a new market segment, sharpen your messaging to your ideal customer, or pressure-test a pricing model against competitive data.

AI can also make tracking data faster and more useful. We've seen leadership teams use AI to build cleaner financial visualizations, accelerate month-end reporting, and surface trends that would have taken hours to spot manually.

People: Someone Needs to Own It

Every function in your business has an owner. Sales, operations, finance. Each has clear accountability in your Organizational Structure.

AI needs the same thing.

For most companies, this won’t be a full-time role. But you need someone whose job it is to stay current, identify where AI fits the work, and help the team adopt it.

And this person won’t necessarily be in IT.

In one company we work with, the person driving AI adoption came from customer service. He started experimenting on his own, saw the potential, and championed it across the organization. Within two years, every member of their leadership team was using AI daily.

We've done the same internally. Our Finance & Administration Manager, Karla, owns AI for our firm and drives it the way any function owner drives their area: with clear accountability and the expectation that it moves us forward.

Execution: Use AI as a Force Multiplier

Your execution rhythm of meetings, dashboards, and documented processes is where AI goes from interesting conversation to measurable business results.

In your meetings, AI can help your team prepare faster, capture decisions more accurately, and follow up more efficiently. In your scorecard, it can populate data faster, spot trends earlier, and flag problems before they show up in a quarterly review.

But the most dramatic results often show up in your processes.

One of our clients recently reported that a project that was estimated at 60 to 80 hours of development time was completed in 90 minutes using AI.

These results were only possible because the team had already documented their processes well enough to know exactly what they needed.

AI didn't replace their thinking. It just accelerated execution of work that was already clearly defined.

How intentionally is AI being led in your organization today?

Simply making AI available is not enough.

The highest-adopting teams don’t treat AI as an experiment or a side project. They make it part of how work gets done.

We are encouraging our clients to move from AI curiosity to AI capability by guiding its use together with their people.

A good place to start is by adding AI adoption as a topic to your next leadership or departmental team meeting agenda.

Here are 5 questions to prompt the discussion:

1. Where could AI most clearly improve the way our team works today? Think drafting, analysis, planning, problem-solving, research, or decision support — not technology for its own sake.

2. Who owns AI adoption in our organization right now? Is that accountability reflected in our Organizational Structure? If no one owns it, whose seat does it belong in?

3. Are our managers actively encouraging and modeling AI use? Or are employees left to figure it out on their own?

4. What concerns or uncertainties might be holding team members back? How safe do people feel experimenting, asking questions, or admitting they don't yet see the value?

5. What repeatable process could we hand to AI as a pilot project this quarter? Who will own that experiment?

   
   

There’s no question that AI will change how your business operates. The question is whether you'll lead that change intentionally.

--

If you'd like to talk through how AI fits into your Business Operating System, we’d be happy to chat with you. Schedule a Growth Consultation with one of our business advisors.