The Roadmap: Your Executive Adoption Plan

Why this module exists

Every preceding module produced an artefact. This one assembles them into a plan that survives three separate hostile reviews — finance, legal, and a change of priorities — and that a board can approve without having to trust you.

The difference between a roadmap and a wish list is that a roadmap states what is being sequenced against what, what it costs, how you will know, and what happens when it does not work.

10.1 Sequencing

The instinct is to sequence by value: biggest prize first. That is wrong for a programme in its first year, and the reason is organisational rather than technical.

Sequence against two axes.

Readiness means: the data exists and can be moved (Module 4), the decision rights are clear (Module 5), the governance path is walkable (Module 6), and there is a named owner with capacity. Any one of those missing turns a high-value project into a long one.

Then a second criterion that most plans omit: evidence value. Your first deployment is buying two things — a business result and organisational belief. In year one, belief is often worth more, because it determines whether anything else gets funded.

That argues for a first project that is:

• Boring. Nobody's reputation is attached to a nightly report landing correctly.
• Fast. Weeks, not quarters. Momentum is a resource.
• Measurable against an existing number. So the result is not a matter of opinion.
• Owned by someone who wanted it. A volunteer sponsor outperforms a mandated one every time.

10.2 Three horizons

A structure that survives contact with a board because each horizon has a different question.

Ninety days — does this work here?

• One system live, at autonomy level 2 or 3, with a measured result against a baseline.
• The governance baseline from Module 6: system inventory, processing locations, masking, traces, one control map completed.
• The labelled portfolio and no-list published internally.

Twelve months — does it work at portfolio scale?

• Three to five systems in production, each with gates that pass the override test.
• The evaluation set established as a corporate asset, in your systems.
• Vendor decisions made through the Module 7 scorecard rather than ad hoc.
• The first layer audit completed and one structural change made.

Thirty-six months — does the organisation look different?

• Structural redesign of the layers identified in Module 9.
• Advantage thesis from Module 8 either evidenced or falsified, with capital reallocated accordingly.
• Compliance position converted from cost to commercial asset where the market rewards it.

Be honest that horizon three is a direction, not a plan. Anyone presenting a detailed thirty-six-month AI plan is presenting fiction, and a board that has read Module 2 will know it.

10.3 Funding models

Each model produces a predictable pathology. Choose knowingly.

The recurring problem in all three is the plumbing. The movement layer, the trace infrastructure, the evaluation-set discipline and the control set benefit everyone and belong to no one's business case. If you fund only what has an attributable return, you will not fund them, and every subsequent project will pay for their absence.

The practical answer used by most organisations that get past year one: fund the platform centrally as infrastructure, fund the use cases locally against their own numbers. Then defend the platform line at budget time using the same argument as networking or identity — it is not a project, it is a precondition.

10.4 Metrics your CFO will accept

Four families, in ascending order of credibility.

Three disciplines make the difference between a number and an argument.

Baseline before deployment. Measured over a period long enough to contain normal variation. If you have not baselined, you cannot claim anything, and the honest move is to say so rather than construct a comparison afterwards.

Name the counterfactual. What would have happened anyway? Volumes change, seasons change, and paying attention to a process for the first time in five years improves it on its own. Where you can, keep a comparable group running the old way for the measurement period. Where you cannot, say explicitly that you cannot — a stated limitation survives scrutiny; an unstated one destroys credibility when found.

Convert "hours saved" into something that appears in accounts. This is where most AI business cases die. Hours saved are real but they are not money until they become something: fewer contractors, absorbed growth without hiring, a backlog cleared that was costing revenue, or faster cycle time that changes a customer outcome. State which. If the honest answer is "the team has more slack," say that too — it may still be worth funding, but it is not a saving and your CFO will know.

10.5 The board conversation

Module 2's finding, applied: boards rarely want AI. What they want is evidence that the company is not being quietly disrupted while they are not looking. "What is our AI strategy?" is the phrasing available to them for that anxiety.

Answer the literal question and you present a technology roadmap into a conversation about exposure, and lose. Answer the real one and you get to choose the technology.

Bring four things:

1. The exposure analysis. Where the cost structure is vulnerable if a competitor halves their cost to serve; which processes break first at double volume; what would have to be true for this to be existential rather than a margin question. None of these sentences contains the word AI.
2. The labelled portfolio and the no-list. The no-list is the credibility instrument. A yes-list proves you complied with pressure; only a no-list proves you evaluated. Four projects declined with stated reasons make the fifth sound like a finding rather than enthusiasm.
3. One shipped thing. However small. Strategy is what people ask for when they cannot see anything.
4. One number you would be embarrassed to get wrong. A single measurable claim with a date. This is Akerlof's guarantee, issued by you about yourself, and it converts you from the person with opinions into the person with a forecast.

Expect three questions and have the answers written:

• "Are we behind?" — Answer with the Module 8 asset analysis, not with a vendor comparison.
• "What if the technology changes?" — Answer with the Module 1 economics: capability is unpredictable, price is predictable, so we are building the slow parts that do not depend on either.
• "What is the risk?" — Answer with the Module 6 control map and a named owner per control. Vague reassurance here is what triggers a second, worse meeting.

10.6 Designing for the budget cut

Every plan should state what happens when it is cut by 40%, because eventually one will be. A portfolio that degrades gracefully has three properties:

The plumbing survives. Movement, traces and the control set are the last things to cut, because everything else depends on them and they are slow to rebuild.

Projects are separable. A programme where five systems depend on one another fails entirely at the first cut. Independent systems fail individually.

Each system has a manual fallback. Module 5's rollback action, at portfolio level. If a system is switched off, the work still happens — more slowly. A workflow with no manual path is an operational risk disguised as an efficiency.

Write this section into the plan explicitly. Boards read it as maturity, and it is the section you will be most grateful for.

Exercise — Assemble the roadmap

Time: 2 hours. Produces the artefact for this module and the input to the capstone.

1. Write the exposure section — three paragraphs, no mention of AI.
2. Place your portfolio on the value/readiness matrix. Identify what is blocked on readiness rather than on technology, and name the specific blocker.
3. Choose the first project using the four criteria in 10.1. Defend the choice on evidence value, not only on return.
4. Write the three horizons, with specific deliverables at ninety days and twelve months and a direction at thirty-six.
5. Choose a funding model and write one sentence on the pathology you expect and how you will detect it.
6. Write the metric block: baseline, claim, counterfactual, and how hours convert into something that appears in accounts.
7. Write the degradation section: what survives a 40% cut, and what the manual fallback is.
8. Write the one number you would be embarrassed to get wrong, with a date.

Then present it in ten minutes to a colleague briefed to play a hostile CFO, and write down the question you could not answer. That question is your next week's work.

Self-check

1. Why should the first project be selected partly on evidence value rather than purely on return?
2. Which funding model does your organisation use, and which pathology is already visible?
3. Your business case says "saves 3,000 hours a year." What must you add for a CFO to accept it?
4. What is the counterfactual for your flagship project, and can you actually hold one?
5. If your budget were cut 40% next quarter, which part of your plan would you protect, and why that part?

Further reading

• McKinsey, The State of AI — on workflow redesign, and on how few organisations measure at all.
• MIT Project NANDA, The GenAI Divide, 2025 — read specifically as a warning about measurement discipline.
• Modules 3, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of this course, whose artefacts are the inputs to this plan.