Five numbers. One pilot. Less noise. Faster wins.
Dear Leaders,
AI promised clarity. Your day still begins with ten dashboards and ends with decision fatigue. If your calendar is full and your pipeline feels slow, the problem is not a lack of effort. The problem is the signal.
Executives make more than two hundred decisions a day—pile on conflicting reports, tool overlap, and speed drops. Strategy does not break results. Fuzzy signal does.
Here is the fix. Treat AI as a clarity engine. Filter first. Act fast. Measure what pays.
Run the business on five numbers
- Revenue velocity. How fast does a qualified pipeline become cash?
- Win rate. How often do you convert the right deals?
- Cycle time. How long do your key steps really take?
- Customer health. Likelihood to renew and expand.
- Regrettable attrition. People you cannot afford to lose.
If a metric does not change a decision, it does not belong on the front page.
Ask for context, not just data
Every report should answer So what and Now what.
Examples.
• So what. Enterprise’s win rate fell three points in Q3 due to stalled legal reviews.
• Now what? Add a standard MSA to proposals and insert legal prechecks at discovery. Owner. Sales Ops. Due date. Friday.
Pilot like a pro
Pick one revenue moment and ship a real result in seven days. Proposal turnaround. Renewal risk. Lead qualification. Give one owner one goal and one rule. AI must beat the current baseline in terms of time to value or quality. If it cannot, retire it and move on. Document the lesson and share it at the Monday meeting.
Cut red tape to protect speed
Write a one-page AI policy. Keep customer data out of open tools. Check outputs for bias and fabrication. List which vendors touch data and why. Train managers to enforce. Short rules create a long runway.
Tune the stack
Add one tool. Retire one tool. Do this every month. Overlap is expensive. Duplicate data is confusing. Cleaner architecture gives you a cleaner signal and a lower total cost.
Culture check
Ask this at the end of every dashboard review. What will we do in the next seven days? If the team cannot answer in one sentence, the data was not helpful.
A little real talk
My AI stack looks like my streaming apps. I pay for six and use two. The goal is not more features. The goal is one clear next step that moves revenue, margin, or retention.