Money, time and who's responsible
A spending ceiling, protected hours, and the people who keep the loop turning.
An aim without money, time and named people is a wish. This lesson fills in the practical half of your aim page: what you'll spend, how much time people get, and who keeps the loop turning.
A spending ceiling, set before anything is bought
AI costs are easy to get wrong in both directions. Gartner found that organisations which don't understand how generative AI costs scale can misjudge them by 500% to 1,000%. The answer isn't a spreadsheet. It's a ceiling: the most you'll spend on AI tools and builds during this loop, agreed in advance and enforced by the guardrails you set up in module 2.
Alongside it, set a small experiment budget for trying new offerings. Every experiment gets kill criteria before it starts, so a good idea can grow and a bad one stops cheaply.
Token leaderboards and “percentage of staff using AI” targets reward activity, not outcomes. They encourage exactly the speed-at-the-wrong-step you saw in lesson 1. Measure the goal on your aim page, and nothing else.
Protected hours
Docebo found that 85% of employees can't apply the AI training they're given, and 56% are too overwhelmed by manual work to learn new tools at all. Training squeezed into spare minutes doesn't stick.
Protected hours are time each month, on the calendar, for people to learn and improve their own work. Enough to redesign one real task properly. You'll use them in module 5.
The hours you protect pay for themselves if freed time goes where you said it would. That's what the conversion record on day 90 checks.
Who's responsible
The first loop needs two named people on day 0, and a third by day 14.
- A sponsor. The executive who visibly backs this and signs the promises. Prosci's long-running research on change ranks active, visible sponsorship as the biggest single factor in whether change works.
- Someone who runs the loop. They keep the three meetings going and answer the front door within 10 working days. It takes a few hours a week. A pilot asks for at least four.
- Someone who leads the bottleneck. Named on day 14, once you know what the bottleneck is. You'll do that in module 4.
The first 90 days
Day 0 is the day the aim is announced and the promises are signed. By day 14 you've named the bottleneck and written down what you expect to happen. From day 15 you improve the work around it. The first result comes from improving, not from building. On day 90, you measure against what you wrote down.
The executive who visibly backs this and signs the promises.
Keeps the meetings going and answers the front door within 10 working days.
Pick a start date to see your three dates.
Two names on day 0, a third by day 14, and a ceiling the guardrails enforce.
Your sponsor is the COO, and they're stretched. Who should run the loop day to day?
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