One-Page AI Sponsor Plan
Free. No email required.
A one-page companion to “Use More AI” Is Not a Plan, part of the AI-Native Ways of Working field guide.
This page is for a leader who is about to tell the organization to use more AI, or who already has. Fill in each blank yourself, in your own words, delete the guidance under each heading, and send what's left to the people who got the instruction. Keep it to one page.
1. What the AI Use Is For
Say what you want from AI right now. If the first goal is to explore and experiment, say so in those words.
- What we want from AI over the next few months: ______
- Where we are today with AI, as far as I know: ______
2. How Long the High Limits Last, and What Happens After
If you want people to explore, give them high budgets to begin with and tell them you know it will cost a lot. Then tell them now how long that lasts, so they are expecting the lower limits when they arrive.
- The spending limits to begin with: ______
- How many months those higher limits will last: ______
- What happens after that (for example, limits come down gradually): ______
- How someone who needs more can request an increase: ______
3. What Kinds of Problems to Go After
Many people who are told to use AI and figure it out don't know how to start or what is possible. Tell them what kinds of things to experiment with and what kinds of problems you would like them to solve.
- The kinds of problems I'd like people to go after: ______
- The kinds of things worth experimenting with: ______
- One or two creative uses from inside our own organization, such as a tedious chore a colleague no longer has to do: ______
4. How I'll Ask in Both Directions
Put both questions on a schedule, and say when and where each one gets asked.
- When and how I'll ask what problems people are facing, whether AI could help, and who wants to take them on: ______
- When and how I'll ask what people are already using AI for, what they have solved, and how: ______
- How I'll pull people together when several of them turn out to be building similar tools: ______
When people show you what they've built, notice whether you're only paying attention to the one that fixes your own problem, and ask about the work that has nothing to do with it.
Before You Send It
- [ ] Someone who got the original instruction has read this page and can tell me, in their own words, what the AI use is for.
- [ ] The page says how long the high limits last and what happens after.
- [ ] The page names kinds of problems, not only tools.
- [ ] Both questions in section 4 have a date on them.
After you send it, ask a few of the people who received it what the plan is.
Your Own Use of AI
Leave this part off the page you send. You will write a better page once you have gone past the beginner level yourself. Pick a piece of your own work that repeats, have the AI save what it learns from your feedback as documents in a folder you control, and run it on the real work more than once. Check what comes back each time against what you know to be true, and watch what the work costs.
This is a fit question, not a recipe. Where your organization actually sits against this page, and what that's costing, is what the Engineering Ways of Working Diagnostic is built to find.