Before You Introduce AI Into Your Company, Clear Your Desk First

We’ve become used to living with technological debt. AI only amplifies that debt, but there is still something that can be done about it. Having ChatGPT or Claude licences across the company is a good start, but the true efficiency is achieved through slightly different paths.

Data? The rule of “garbage in, garbage out” has been applied since the very first computers, and nothing has changed in the AI era. AI-ready data are structured (readable for both people and machines), contextualised (we know what they relate to and who owns them), searchable (one single source of truth, not seven different versions across seven different drives), clean (without duplicates or files left behind by people who left years ago), and connected (a client in the CRM can be linked to an invoice as well as meeting notes). None of this is rocket science. It is more a matter of hygiene — something very few companies truly maintain, yet absolutely essential if businesses want to move forward. Forward towards real AI efficiency.

Start With Yourself — Your Laptop is a Reflection of Your Company

Tomorrow morning, open your desktop. How many icons are there? Throw them into an Archive folder and start cleaning up. Turn your inbox into three folders only — To Do, Waiting, and Reference. Create a single place for notes and knowledge. It matters far more that you stay disciplined than whether you use Notion, Obsidian, or Apple Notes. Name files in a way both people and machines can understand: 2026-05_ClientX_Proposal_v2.pdf, not final_FINAL_really.docx. This five-minute hygiene routine is the difference between AI that hallucinates generic text and AI that can write a proposal in the same tone you’ve been using with clients for the past ten years.

Three questions are enough: Where does your key data live? Who owns it? How is it connected? Most
medium-sized companies discover that their critical know-how exists only in the heads of two or three people, inside a shared Drive with no permissions structure, and in Excel sheets endlessly circulating by email.

Just as many people hire a company to clean their office, it may be worth considering someone who can help clean up your data if you do not have the capacity to handle it yourself.

Do You Have an AI Driver in Your Company?

We have started developing the concept of the AI Driver within companies and institutions. An AI Driver is a proactive individual who has already been working with AI for quite some time. Their goal is to connect with strong AI communities around them, giving them access to people solving similar problems, a place where they can ask questions, and ideally also support from an AI acceleration partner for around 5–15 hours per month.

This partner is someone who works with AI every day and helps the company’s AI Driver navigate the landscape, offering direction and perspective when needed. The AI Driver’s role is to search for opportunities, stay curious about emerging technologies, experiment with rapid prototyping through vibe coding, map internal processes, and monitor trends.

Over time, they can become an excellent sparring partner for external suppliers of more advanced AI solutions, saving the company dozens of hours otherwise spent explaining internal processes and business context. They can also capture operational needs and, with the help of various AI tools, prepare specifications. A specification is essentially a clearly documented need or problem that can later be addressed either in-house or together with an external supplier.

Ideally, this is someone who enjoys sharing knowledge and is comfortable operating in a fast-changing environment.

You may already know who this person is within your company — Or perhaps you do not yet. One of the defining traits of an AI Driver is that you do not have to convince them to do it. They want to do it naturally.

In smaller teams, this role may fall to you as the business owner, simply because nobody else will do it for you. In larger companies, however, you unfortunately cannot be the AI Driver yourself. Even so, it is important to spend at least a few hours each week studying AI trends so that you understand what your AI Driver is trying to solve and what value it may bring. Open dialogue is worth its weight in gold today.

In the AI world, the rules no longer change every six months —They now shift almost weekly. That is why it is essential to stay at least basically informed. High-quality communities and regular weekly calls are an excellent way to do that.

The AI Driver concept is designed to help companies cultivate AI innovation internally through someone who already understands the business and, ideally, someone you trust. The assumption is not that the Driver is an AI expert. That is why they need to connect with people who truly understand the field and are willing to share knowledge openly.

From there, companies should begin assessing their actual readiness. What condition is the data in? What does the IT infrastructure look like? How well is the operational context of the business documented? Are teams using unified tools, or does everyone rely on their own personal accounts across different platforms?

AI adoption is not about one massive transformation — Established habits rarely allow for that anyway. It is about a series of smaller, focused deliveries of quick wins that happen consistently over time.