Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success

A book about using AI successfully, being reviewed by a human that also has to run their review through an AI detector, creates an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, as this book points out, the AI genie is out of the bottle and never going back in, regardless of the screaming. On the other hand, how deep down the AI rabbit hole will the average business go?

Charlene Li and Dr. Katia Walsh wrote this book for business leaders who know AI is coming (well, here, but they’re still just getting there), and can’t yet figure out how much is hype and what they really need to integrate into their company and workflow. Their primary argument is that AI should support business goals rather than be a strategy in itself. Setting aside the multitude of businesses that are now adding AI to their business plans and company slogans to goose their stock price.

Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success is a practical guide to adding AI into a business with result tracking and not scattered experimentation. Li and Walsh focus on speed (said 90-Day blueprint), governance, and value, not just one-off pilot projects or adding AI as a checklist item that can be reported back to the board as “done”. Transformation requires attention, leadership, and follow-through with measurable results. This book helps with all three. It provides a more practical approach than one might usually see from a hot and hyped new technology book.

Can you do it in 90-days? That’s up to you. Winning with AI just gives you a guide to doing it, not just some broad advice with no actual path to action. The larger the organization, the longer it will take. But having a road map to success is better than a vague “let’s add AI to the sales team next quarter.” Maybe you’ve lived through multiple workplace transformations. The fax machine transformed work, email did, and the internet as a sales and marketing platform did. Blockchain and now AI. But AI might end up being the most consequential change the world has yet to experience.

The “change is coming, get on board” style of business books has a long and storied history. AI is just the latest. But even so, Winning with AI has a value because it keeps going back to its central thesis – AI will only really be useful when a company has real goals, ownership, and measurable outcomes.