What’s inside

01Why most AI adoption fails at the team level
02Mapping your team's work to AI readiness
03A framework for evaluating AI tools
04Building the business case without the hype
05Phased rollout: pilots, guardrails, and feedback loops
06Upskilling your team without overwhelming them
07Governance and risk at the team level
08Measuring what matters: beyond productivity metrics
09Communicating up, down, and sideways
10Twelve-month roadmap template

Who this guide is for

—Team leads and department heads evaluating AI tools
—Middle managers tasked with AI adoption initiatives
—Project managers overseeing AI-related workstreams
—Senior individual contributors influencing team direction

What you’ll be able to do

—Assess which tasks in your team are genuinely suitable for AI assistance
—Evaluate AI tools using a structured, vendor-neutral framework
—Build a phased adoption plan that manages risk and builds confidence
—Communicate AI strategy to senior leadership and direct reports
—Establish lightweight governance for AI use within your team

Most guides to AI strategy are written for executives making portfolio-level decisions. This guide is for the people who actually have to make AI work: team leaders.

Whether you've been asked to "explore AI opportunities" or you're watching your team spend hours on tasks that could be assisted by AI, this guide gives you a clear, structured approach to adoption that doesn't require a data science degree or a six-figure consulting engagement.

What makes this guide different

This isn't a survey of AI products or a cheerful tour of what's possible. It's a working document designed to help you make grounded decisions about if, when, and how to introduce AI tools into your team's workflow.

Every recommendation is framed around practical constraints: limited budgets, sceptical colleagues, legitimate concerns about accuracy, and the reality that most teams can't pause their existing work to run experiments.

Who shouldn't buy this guide

If you're looking for a technical deep-dive into model architectures, this isn't it. If you want a breathless overview of everything AI can do, you'll be disappointed. This guide is deliberately narrow — it's about leading AI adoption in a team of 5–50 people, and it's honest about what's hard.

How to use this guide

Read chapters 1–3 first to build your assessment. Then use chapter 5 to plan your first pilot. The remaining chapters work as reference material you'll return to as your adoption matures. The twelve-month roadmap template in chapter 10 is designed to be adapted to your context — not followed rigidly.