In May I helped a major medtech company jumpstart its internal AI efforts. In the process I came up with a way of thinking about the journey a company takes to fully embrace AI.
I keep having the same conversation and figured it’d be worth a post.
Locate Yourself is a five-stage taxonomy of how a person or an organization actually relates to AI: AI Luddite, AI Curious, AI Committed, AI Compounded, and AI Native.
- AI Luddite (Refusing). Someone has decided AI is a fad, a threat, or someone else’s problem. Yes, some folks and orgs are still stuck here! “Wait and see” often means the same thing.
- AI Curious (Watching, reading, attending briefings). People read the news and watch the demos. They ask good questions in meetings and maybe have a few ChatGPT sessions going. Curiosity that never touches real work is procrastination with better branding. I wrote about that trap in You Are Behind in Using AI.
- AI Committed (Doing real work with AI). Teams put AI on problems they already own. They ship imperfect experiments. They treat the output as information, not as a verdict on anyone’s intelligence. Most of my catch-up advice lives here: curiosity that turns into doing.
- AI Compounded (Stacking gains, multi-AI systems, flywheels running). One win becomes a habit and habits become mechanisms. Docs, gates, prompts, and review loops reinforce each other. Last week’s learning becomes part of the context used next week, so the second and third wins get cheaper. Prompt to Metal and No-Look Coding and the Five Stages of Grief are what that compounding looks like when it gets uncomfortable.
- AI Native (AI is the default way we work and build). AI is not a project. Work starts there. Specs treat agents as first readers. Humans review outcomes, not every diff. Nobody is told “use AI on this task.” because that would be redundant.
I think most orgs today are AI Curious and most leaders think they’re AI Committed. Very few humans or orgs are AI Native today. That gap is the point of this post.
Curious looks like interest. Committed looks like changed calendars, changed review standards, and changed definitions of done. Compounded looks like cheaper second wins because the team invested in the system around the work.
What does AI Native look like? I dunno, but I’m trying my damndest to show others. I just founded a new company and am committed to making it AI Native from the get-go. Everything, from how the company is structured, to finance, to HR, and especially product development is done through AI agents with a small number of humans “in the loop”: https://www.excaliwire.com
Look at the Locate Yourself image above and ask yourself (or your org):
- Where are we?
- Where do we claim we are?
- Where do we want to be in 90 days?
- What in next week’s work moves us one stage?
Steal the graphic if it helps. Argue with me about the boundaries. Just stop saying “we’re doing AI” when the honest sentence is “we are watching closely.”
Where are you? Where do you want to be? Tell me in the comments, or tell me the stages are wrong.