AI for Business: The 2026 Executive Playbook

Introduction

Most companies over-invest in strategy decks and under-invest in getting one workflow into production.

Table of contents

• Choose a pilot workflow
• Pick vendors and models
• Governance and safety
• Change management
• Scale playbook

1. Choose a pilot workflow

Pick a workflow with clear metrics, willing users and a bounded risk profile. Customer support triage is the classic first win.

FAQs

Do we need our own model?

Almost never — API access to frontier models plus RAG covers 95% of use cases.