CEO Playbook
CEO AI Playbook
A free AI strategy guide for CEOs, executives and boards: decide what AI should do for your business, with eight chapters and a one-page Strategy Canvas.
1. Who it's for
Written for the people who set AI strategy and answer for the results:
CEOs under pressure to have an AI plan while running a tight budget and a stretched team.
Executives who need to turn ambition into work their teams can deliver.
Non-executive directors judging management's proposals while still learning the technology themselves.
It assumes no technical background. It is about decisions: what AI should contribute, who it affects, what it costs, and how you will know whether it worked.
Get the Playbook (PDF). We'll email it to you straight away.
2. What you'll get
Everything your leadership team needs for one focused conversation about AI:
A 22-page guide in eight chapters, written for leadership teams rather than technologists.
The Strategy Canvas, a one-page A3 worksheet your leadership team fills in together. It records the outcome you want, what is in and out of scope, the time and money available, and what the team can decide for itself. It then becomes the team's brief.
A worked example that follows a fictional mid-market firm, Harbour, from first direction to a mixed pilot result.
Evidence, not hype. Findings from research and from our own client work, including the cases where AI did less than expected.
3. What's inside
Eight chapters, each ending in decisions your leadership team can take:
Introduction. The pressures on a CEO weighing up AI, why AI raises sensitivities that earlier technology changes did not, and three actions to begin.
Decide what AI should contribute to the business. Start from the business you are trying to build: margin, capacity, growth, service or a funding event. Each aim gives AI a different job and needs different evidence. Includes five questions about how your market could change over three to five years, and the choice of who keeps the benefit when work gets more efficient.
Understand what customers want from the change. A customer may welcome an automated update and still want a person to resolve a complaint. How to look at the whole experience, including the people who give up, and how AI may change the way customers find and compare you.
Make an honest agreement with your people. The people doing the work often know whether an AI application will be useful. How to ask for their help honestly, including saying so if cutting labour costs is part of the aim, building time into the working week, supporting middle managers, and finding out what tools people already use without telling you.
Give the CEO, executives and NEDs useful roles. The four roles every significant initiative needs, six ways non-executive directors can help, and how to keep board oversight connected to the work.
Invest in the whole change. A demo shows what a tool can do in set conditions. An investment decision covers everything needed to make it useful: information, integration, training, checking and support. How to be precise about the benefit, read a time-saving claim, and fund early work, testing and expansion as separate decisions.
Decide what can go into use and how to judge it. A tool that drafts a reply needs different authority from one that sends it. What to settle before anything goes live, six areas of measures that explain the result, and how to read a mixed result.
Next steps. How to sponsor the work: bring the leadership team together, agree the frame on the Strategy Canvas, and hand it to the people who will investigate the opportunities.
4. A worked example: Harbour
Harbour is a fictional mid-market firm that the Playbook follows from first idea to first result. Its routine proposals took 15 working days and 16 hours of staff time each. Leaders set a target of five days and 10 hours, and approved a limited AI pilot.
Technically, the pilot missed its target. Across six proposals, turnaround more than halved, from 15 days to 7, and staff time fell from 16 hours to 11, under budget. But the goal was five days, and one proposal was missing its senior-approval record.
What they learned:
The gain was real, but not yet proven. Six proposals is a small sample, and process changes arrived alongside the AI, so they couldn't tell how much of the improvement came from each.
The control had a gap. A missing approval record doesn't mean the review didn't happen, but they couldn't show that it had.
Saying "it worked" would have been premature. So they claimed no cash savings and no better win rate.
What they decided: fix the approval control first, stop sending AI-assisted drafts outside the firm until it was fixed, keep testing internally, and come back to the expansion decision with better evidence. Not a rollout yet, and not a stop. That's the kind of decision the Playbook helps you make.
Harbour's Strategy Canvas: the first version its leadership team agreed on, before anyone had looked at the work in detail.
5. Three things to do this week
Before you read a word of the Playbook:
Ask one question at your next leadership meeting. "If AI made one part of this business noticeably better within a year, which part, and how would we know?" Give it 20 minutes and write down the answers.
Find out what's already happening. Ask your managers which AI tools their teams use today, what for, and what information goes into them. One email. You will learn more than you expect, and people are using these tools whether there is a policy or not.
Pick one slow, annoying process and ask someone to find out why it's slow. Don't buy anything yet. Give them two weeks. Most good AI projects start with that question, not with a tool.
The Playbook shows how to turn the answers into a plan your board can back. Get the Playbook (PDF).
6. Working with Bloch AI
We run Strategy Canvas sessions with boards and executive teams, and turn the results into a plan with owners, budgets and review points. We also help teams build their first AI applications, and work with risk, legal and internal audit so the work stands up to scrutiny.
Email us at: hello@bloch.ai.
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