A Week-by-Week Guide to Setting Up Your 90-Day AI Plan

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Whenever I advise leaders to form a comprehensive 90-day plan to kick-start their generative AI strategy, they look at me like I’ve got two heads.?

I understand why.?

The truth is, this 90-day plan is a thought experiment. It has yet to be done from start to finish in that time. Organizations have tackled different aspects of their AI journey, but in my research, they haven’t followed all the steps exactly as I’ve laid them out.?

Again, I understand why. This is not the typically way organizations approach “strategy.” Usually, a strategy is something we etch into stone and then spend months—or even years—executing it. Generative AI strategies are quite the opposite. We jot down a plan, figure out what we want to do, and assume it’s all going to change.?

It seems chaotic, sure, but it’s directional. The 90-day plan is just that: It’s a version of “strategy” in which we know what we will prioritize and what we won’t. And it’s founded on four guiding principles.

The 4 Guiding Principles of the 90-Day Plan

When creating your 90-day generative AI plan, you’ll want to consider the following:

1. Let Your Values Inform Your Choices

Your values—your organization's mission and strategy—should deeply inform your plan. Generative AI strategies are very different from most. They raise plenty of ethical questions about responsibility, so many leaders jump to use cases or technology first. Instead, you should start with what is already a foundation in your organization.?

Ask yourself: “What do we stand for?” “What are the values we want to protect and project into our generative AI strategy?”?

I recently spoke with leadership at a company that aligned perfectly with this principle. During COVID, even though they didn’t have enough work to go around, they decided to retain all of their employees. It was challenging and costly, but it was true to their values, so they made it work. And when generative AI came calling, their values once again informed their decision-making. They found ways to save on some costs by using AI, but rather than take those savings and cut into headcount, they found new ways to create value with their employees.?

2. Focus on Progress, Not Perfection

When I've worked with executive teams on their generative AI approach I ask them, “Just off the top of your head, where do you think generative AI will impact your strategy and competitive advantage the most?” They’ll often say, “Well, I'm not sure but probably these things.” And they’ll list a handful of priorities.?

That's a great starting point. You don’t need to have every detail mapped out, but you know what those big buckets are and the direction you want to carry them.?

3. Write It Down

This one is so important yet so often ignored. For many, writing down your generative AI plan can feel like you’re making a significant commitment, which can in turn, feel constrictive. Just remember that writing it down doesn’t set it in stone like strategies of the past. It doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind. What it does, however, is create alignment throughout your teams and organizations. And if you don’t write it, it doesn’t exist.?

4. The Plan Will Change As We Learn

It’s so important to understand that adjustments will need to be made as you develop your plan. The technology will advance. You may need to rethink how you intend to reach a goal or the path you’ll need to take to get there. If you recognize this upfront, you’ll have the capacity to change your plan as needed and the guiding principles to help you navigate where you are headed—not just for the 90-day planning period, but onwards.

How to Create Your 90-Day Plan

Ready to create the 18-month strategy for your organization’s generative AI strategy in 90 days? You might need more than 90 days to do this or less. Every organization is different, but these are the steps to create a rigorous, strategic approach to generative AI.?

Week 1: Play Defense

AI tools are powerful and come with inherent risks. The most crucial first step you can make is determining the essential use policies you need to protect your organization’s data, customer information, and copyright. If you already have them in place, great; if not, this is the time to get a handle on protections. You may want to halt any use of AI until you set up some basic pieces of training and figure out how to begin safely. Or put in guidelines and start designing training on when and how to use generative AI for specific tasks and detail what people shouldn’t be doing.?

Week 2: Establish Principles

This week, your focus should be on those guiding principles and figuring out what they look like in practice at your organization. Ethical dilemmas surrounding AI tools will inevitably come up. Situations in which you’ll need to choose between your bottom line and your values will arise. From the outset, you must know how employees will use guiding principles to inform decisions and guide them along this process.

Week 3: Connect to Strategy

Every decent company has a pre-existing strategy. Use that strategy to determine what assumptions about the source of your competitive advantage remain valid with the development of generative AI, which assumptions are no longer helpful, and what needs to be adjusted as you prepare for a generative AI transformation.

The worst thing you can do is make an exhaustive list of all the possible applications and use cases and work off of that. You don’t have the time to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.?

Instead, look for specific critical pillars within your current strategy worth reinforcing. For instance, in my research, I spoke to an organization whose strategic foundation is in customer experience. That’s been their competitive advantage. They pondered, “If we’re a customer experience company at our core, how will we use generative AI to enhance the customer experience?” By making that connection, they were able to move forward.

Week 4: Create the AI Council

In last week’s livestream and Leading Disruption newsletter, I spoke in detail about the importance of AI Councils, and if you’re following my 90-day plan, this is the time to put yours into place.?

The AI Council can be a very small core team to start, but create it with those strategic pillars in mind and an understanding of how generative AI will support them. It should also include people who are representative of those critical pillars and the business operations, as well as someone from the technology and data privacy teams. For example, the organization I mentioned that focused on customer experience formed an AI council with representatives from the lines of business and operations to provide business context.?

Week 5: Identify Top Applications

This is where the rubber meets the road. It’s where you look inside those big buckets and identify your organization's most promising applications of generative AI. Again, this isn’t meant to be a long, comprehensive listing of use cases; instead, it should be the top strategic initiatives.?

This week, you should also identify the requirements for people, process, technology, and data—four classic strategy and digital transformation buckets.?

Week 6: Assess Feasibility?

How realistic is your plan thus far? This week, you’ll find out. Ask yourself: “Do we have the people with the skills and the capabilities to make this happen?” “Do we have the processes in place—or do we see a way forward to create that process?” “What gaps do we have regarding technology and data that need filling?” “How much are these applications going to cost to develop? How long is it going to take?”

Week 7: Prioritize & Plan

Based on the results of your feasibility analysis, this week is when you pull the whole long-term plan together. Yes, you are in the thick of your 90-day plan, and this is where you flesh out a rolling 18-month plan for your generative AI strategy, which provides a longer landscape for accomplishing priorities once you’ve laid down some foundational work. This is the time to phase out initiatives and to budget time, people, and money accordingly. This plan should be a rolling one, in which, at the end of the first quarter, you add another quarter with updates so that you can adjust and modify the strategy as you go. Because guaranteed, things are going to change quickly!

Week 8: Communicate

This week may very well be your most nerve-wracking. You will undoubtedly still have questions about your long-term planning, but you must start communicating and sharing it outside of that small AI council to move into execution. Determine who needs to know about the plan and how they will use it in their current roles, and then decide who will communicate the plan. How will it cascade throughout the organization?

Perhaps your organization will create a larger council beyond the original small AI council. Perhaps you’ll share your guiding principles with all areas of the business so that all employees have transparency around what the organization’s AI strategy will do—and so they have an invitation to participate if they are interested.?

Weeks 9-11:?

As you enter the last third of this 90-day planning period, you will have more autonomy in dividing your focus. Depending on the structure of your generative AI strategy, you may wish to spend these next three weeks working simultaneously—instead of linearly—through the following objectives:

People

Your generative AI strategy will undoubtedly change the nature of how the people in your organization work. You’ll need to consider what roles will be impacted and how job descriptions or career trajectories might need to change. You’ll likely need to revise the processes for hiring, retaining, and promoting employees and conducting performance reviews.?

Again, it will likely be unclear how all of this will take shape over the next 18 months, but this is a vital time to put some basic strategies in place for the evolution of your workforce.

Process

Process, in this case, is all about setting guardrails. Governance doesn’t limit your organization’s ability to act, but quite the opposite. If you can show people boundaries, you can also show them how to reach that boundary as fast as possible. Having parameters—policies, processes, and codes of conduct—allows teams to work more freely and effectively while complying with changing regulations.??

Technology & Data

Ideally, you spent some of Weeks 6 and 7 assessing the state of your data. Now, it’s time to go into detail. What is missing from your technology stack, and how will you compensate for gaps or lags? What partners will you need to get the technology necessary to support the applications you’re creating? How will this evolve over time with advancing generative AI technologies?

Week 12: Update the Plan

Your plan will change. This final week of the 90-day plan reminds you of that. It’s also time to assess how often you will review and update your plan, who to involve in that process, and how you will communicate those changes throughout the organization.

A Final Warning

Now that you’ve seen the full scope of the 90-day plan, it may still feel like a daunting undertaking. You might be inclined to push it off, and leave any work surrounding generative AI plans for another day.

That would be a very dangerous decision.

There are too many risks—to your data, for starters—and too many unknowns to ignore. At the very least, take whatever time you can, whether it’s more than 90 days or less, to outline your planned approach to generative AI.

Your Turn

I’d love your feedback: Is this 90-day plan doable? Is this something you could see yourself doing within your organization? How would you adapt it to your needs?