Part of the "AI Leadership in the Real World" series: how leaders turn AI from scattered pilots and executive excitement into governed, adopted, measurable business capability.
TLDR: 60 ideas on a board. 4 product teams to build them. $1.2M in annualized run cost for pilots that produced $340K in measurable value. The week we made tradeoffs visible was the week AI stopped being a budget line item and started being a product strategy.
My AI backlog looked like a menu with 60 "top priorities" and no kitchen to cook them.
Every function had a smart idea. Every idea came with urgency and a sponsor. Customer support wanted a deflection chatbot. Engineering wanted a code review assistant. Sales wanted lead scoring. Operations wanted anomaly detection. HR wanted resume screening. Finance wanted invoice reconciliation.
Each one was a good idea. That was the problem.
