The 3 Stages of Enterprise AI Adoption

Check out the graphic below, compliments of the brilliant Teresa Murphy who has served as Head of Enterprise Applications, Data & Analytics and AI at some of the world’s top global enterprises.

At our last Commercial Excellence Consortium Executive Roundtable on Agentic AI she shared that most enterprise AI rollouts skip Stages 1 and 2 entirely, then wonder why Stage 3 isn’t happening.

You know the pattern:

• The budget gets approved • The roadmap gets ambitious • The cross-functional task force gets assembled.

Six months in, the actual deployment is a handful of Copilot summaries and one chatbot nobody trusts with a real decision.

20 years of watching commercial transformations tells me this isn't an AI problem, but a sequencing problem the technology category just keeps inheriting.

It is fundamentally a collaboration issue not a technology problem.