Alex Lieberman's AI roadmap playbook
Tenex sells the roadmap I run in-house. Where we match, and the step I'd add after the final presentation.
Alex Lieberman, the Morning Brew cofounder, now runs Tenex, an AI transformation firm. He posted the way they build AI roadmaps for their clients, and Tenex publishes a longer version as a public playbook. I read it twice, because it's the closest thing I've seen to a written description of my own job.
His sequence goes like this. Start at the top, ideally the CEO, and interview for goals and the blockers in the way of them. Those blockers always come down to some mix of people, process, and tech. Survey the operators, because employees will tell a survey what they won't tell a manager. Do a second round of interviews on the specific opportunities that surfaced, and go deep on process, org chart, and data. Then write the roadmap: every opportunity with an ROI estimate that includes all the costs, sequenced by the business's appetite with a bias toward things that have both a high success rate and a high return. His line on priorities is the one I'd underline: cultural momentum is the most important initial priority.
That is find, prove, scale with a consultant's packaging. My version starts with the business unit leader instead of the CEO, because at One Planet Group each leader owns a P&L and none of them report to me. The scorecard I run every idea through weighs the same things his interviews quantify: how often the work happens, how much time it costs, what it's worth, and how hard it is to fix. And his point about momentum is the reason I spend time on AI 101 sessions before I ever pitch a pilot.
The difference is what happens after step six. Tenex delivers a final presentation. I'm still in the building the next morning, which means I get to see what a roadmap looks like nine months in. The thing I'd add to his list is a step seven: name the person who owns each production system every day, and build the monitoring before you need it. The monitoring layer turned out to be the bigger asset on the first program I scaled, and it's the part no roadmap deck ever includes.
If you're an executive being asked for an AI strategy by yesterday, his playbook is a good place to start. Just budget for the part after the presentation.