Generic briefs, unchecked answers. Treating it like a search engine, or owning a Ferrari and driving it in first gear.
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The question for leadership isn't "are we using AI?" It's "which cell are most of our people in, and is that good enough?"
Three kinds of delegation: Chat, Agent, Employee. Three levels of use within each: Poor, Good, Advanced. Most organisations have people scattered across all nine cells without knowing it. Choose the lightest setup that does the work well. Improve the person's skill within it, and widen its reach when the task and the controls justify it.
Click any cell to expand
The free-tier trap. Free tools do teach foundational skills. But their limits are so severe that the opinion people form is "AI is mediocre." They learn to expect poor results and stop pushing. The tool poisons the well: not by being useless, but by being just useful enough to seem representative.
The skill gap. It still takes considerable skill and knowledge to do long, complex tasks. You can generate a PowerPoint slide well, but not a hundred. You can do a piece of research well, but not a whole market research project in one go. The tools are capable; the techniques for sustained, complex work are not obvious.
The expectation gap. People get excited by what these tools can do for individual tasks. They immediately jump to wanting longer and more complex work, and get frustrated at the limits. The gap between excitement and sustained value is where most people get stuck, and where most quietly give up.
The absorption gap. Even when people sustain good usage, the organisation often fails to capture the value. People do better work, but without changes to roles, teams, and processes, the gains are absorbed rather than banked. This is an organisational design problem, not a tool problem, and it's why the diagnostic matters alongside the spectrum.
Progress depends on capability, configuration, integration and ownership. Seeing what an agent can do is the start; making it useful inside the organisation is further work. People still think these tools are for developers. They're just as powerful for senior executives and junior analysts, but the setup, the permissions and the operational owner have to exist before that power reaches them.
And because they're so powerful, they require care: clear boundaries to stop individuals making costly mistakes, and governance to manage security. Choose the checking this task needs.
Almost nobody has one yet, and the ones that exist are often nobody's responsibility. A standing AI employee needs a remit, boundaries, a review rhythm and a named manager, exactly as a human hire does. The tools exist; the operating model around them mostly doesn't. Build the management before the employee, or you have built an unattended agent with a persistent identity.
Start with the business measure and the owner. Name the number that better-used tools should move, and who owns it, before you choose a pilot. Then choose the lightest setup that does the work well, improve the person's skill within it, and widen its reach when the task and the controls justify it.
If your people are on free tiers, move them to paid Chat as soon as you can. The foundational skills transfer; the ceiling doesn't. If free tools are all you have for now, push to advanced usage as fast as you can. It's genuinely powerful, and it will change how your team works.
At the same time, advocate for Agent setups being deployed in your organisation. That conversation usually starts with a single senior sponsor who's seen what's possible and can make the case to IT and leadership together. It doesn't need to be a company-wide rollout. A controlled pilot with the right people, tied to the number you named, is enough to demonstrate the value. Build a session around the capability gap.
Three frameworks, three jobs. DIRECT describes the skills to practise: Decide what to delegate, Instruct with precision, Review with calibrated scepticism, Edit through specific feedback, Craft repeatable systems, Take full ownership. The 4 Ps structure a task. The CEO check (Checked, Edited and Owned) governs what leaves your hands.
We have a demo environment you can try. If you want to explore what agentic AI looks like in practice, ask us for a login and we'll set you up. We're happy to work with your IT and leadership teams to help them understand what this enables.
The question for leadership isn't "are we using AI?" It's "which cell are most of our people in, and is that good enough to make us work better, quicker, and happier?"
This spectrum maps how well individuals use each kind of tool. A separate but related question is how well your organisation captures the value — whether gains stay with individuals or compound across the business. The organisational diagnostic measures that, and the value map shows where the prize sits.
This is an artefact created for David's weekly email. See the others here.