Some firms are still standing in the garden holding seeds, wondering where to start…
Feeling like you don’t know where to start with AI isn’t a sign you’re behind. It’s just what the beginning of something new feels like, and we hear it from firms of every size, small to large.
The challenge is that we’re in a risk-averse industry, so most leaders naturally wait until the uncertainty clears before they move. They want a complete picture before planting anything. But starting an AI journey is less like a construction project with blueprints and more like planting a garden. You don’t need to know what the garden will look like in three years before you put the first seeds in the ground. You prepare the soil, start with what you have, and tend it consistently. Some things grow faster than you expected. Others take longer. But nothing grows if you’re still standing there holding the seeds.
What also surprises many leadership teams is where the early energy comes from when they do start. At one engineering firm we worked with, a young engineer passionate about AI built her own AI agent on her own initiative. No formal mandate, no budget request, no approval chain. Just someone who was curious, capable, and ready to move. She ended up becoming one of the most important voices in how that firm approached AI. Most firms already have someone like that. They’re just not always visible from the top.
That’s also why starting is rarely a one-person job. Executives carry the vision and understand where the business needs to go. The people closest to the work know where the friction is and where the opportunities are hiding in plain sight. The firms that start well bring both perspectives into the same conversation early. Not because it’s the tidy thing to do, but because it’s what makes the strategy actually connect to meaningful work.
Nobody figures this out alone. The firms we’ve seen make significant progress didn’t start with all the answers. They started with the right questions and the willingness to keep going. That’s more than enough to plant the first seeds.
If this is where your firm is right now, hit reply. Sometimes that first conversation is all it takes to get moving.
