Defining a North Star to solve your most important problems with AI

AI is everywhere, transforming industries and creating opportunities to solve problems in new and innovative ways. But without a clear strategy or plan, diving into AI can waste time and resources. It’s really important to define a clear north star for AI that’s informed by your customer and employee's most critical needs and focused on your most impactful business problems.

That’s why earlier this week I launched the AI North Star Playbook with Andrew Duncan. We worked hard to make a helpful tool with a step-by-step approach to lay the groundwork for impactful AI initiatives based on our combined decades of experience. For a limited time, you can grab it for free to get detailed steps, templates, and tools to guide your success.

In this week’s newsletter, I thought I’d share a few nuggets from the playbook 😊

1. Understand your landscape

Before choosing an AI use case or tool, start by understanding your competitive landscape. Knowing where you stand in your industry and how competitors are positioning themselves can reveal opportunities for AI to create unique value.

This step is like mapping a road trip. You can’t plan where to go unless you know where you are. By analyzing competitors, their strengths and weaknesses, and where they’re investing, you can uncover gaps to differentiate your offerings.

Putting this into action:

• Conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to identify your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

• Use tools like Perplexity.ai to uncover competitive intelligence quickly and stay ahead of emerging trends.

• Create “battle cards” to summarize competitor strategies and use them to refine your own positioning.

2. Put customers and employees at the center

Your AI strategy should always begin with the people who matter most, your customers and employees. Understanding their needs, goals, and frustrations ensures that AI solutions are aligned with what delivers the most value.

Think of this as building a bridge. You need to know what your customers and employees are trying to achieve on either side and design solutions that help them get there smoothly. For example, if customers struggle with long onboarding processes, AI could streamline the experience and remove friction.

Putting this into action:

• Develop personas to capture the characteristics, behaviors, and needs of your customers and employees.

• Map out their journeys and identify friction points where they experience delays, confusion, or frustration.

• Use frameworks like “Jobs-to-be-Done” to understand the deeper goals they’re trying to achieve.

3. Align stakeholders around your AI North Star

Once you’ve completed your analysis, the next step is to bring your team together and create alignment. Using an North Star Workshop is a powerful way to prioritize problems/opportunities, generate ideas, and build a shared vision for action.

Workshops allow you to turn insights into action by mapping opportunities, defining success metrics, and selecting the most impactful problems to tackle. When everyone is aligned, it’s easier to focus resources on what truly matters.

4. Focus on quick wins and long-term impact

AI doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing effort. Use the Three Horizons Model to balance immediate improvements with longer-term innovation.

• Horizon 1: Automate repetitive tasks or optimize processes for efficiency.

• Horizon 2: Enhance existing capabilities to build competitive advantages.

• Horizon 3: Think big. Disrupt the industry by designing entirely new AI-driven solutions.

Start with a “quick win” that are easy to implement and offer measurable results. Success here builds confidence and momentum for more ambitious projects.

Putting this into action:

• Use an effort vs. impact matrix to prioritize opportunities based on feasibility and value.

• Define success metrics to measure the impact of your quick win (e.g., time savings, cost reductions, or satisfaction increases).

5. Plan, prototype, and act

The final step is execution. Break your strategy into manageable steps with a 30-60-90 day action plan. This keeps your team focused and ensures progress is measurable and achievable. Clear accountability and deadlines ensure that your AI initiatives move from ideas to reality.

• 30 Days: Line up a team, kick off, assign roles, and finalize requirements.

• 60 Days: Build and test a proof-of-concept (POC), gather feedback and iterate.

• 90 Days: Launch the POC to a pilot audience, evaluate results, and plan for scaling.

Wrapping up

By analyzing your competitive landscape, understanding your customers and employees, aligning stakeholders, and prioritizing impactful solutions, you can create an AI strategy that delivers real results. The AI North Star Playbook gives you the tools and frameworks to guide this process, turning insights into action and ideas into outcomes.

Onward & upward,
Drew