You've Been Told to Do Something With AI. Where Do You Start?

Your board wants an AI strategy. Your team wants a project. Most organizations answer by picking the loudest idea or the flashiest demo, and 95% of AI pilots never deliver measurable business value. In this session, Jarrod Vawdrey, Chief AI Officer at Strongly.AI, walks through the exercise he uses with leadership teams to choose a first AI project that survives scrutiny: score every use case on business value against implementation difficulty, before you build anything. You'll see four typical use cases scored live on the grid, watch the winner pick itself, and learn how one pick turns into a sequenced roadmap of thin slices where each win funds the next. What's covered: • Why "which tool?" is the wrong first question, and what to ask instead • The three traps that decide most first projects: hype, politics, and easy-to-demo • The two scoring lenses: strategic fit, quantifiable impact, and monetization against data, modeling, and production readiness • The four quadrants, and why only one says go first • A live scoring walkthrough of four common use cases • Success criteria, ROI, and Day Two ownership, defined before launch • Why thin slices beat horizontal platform builds • How your context layer compounds across projects while generic models stay a commodity • People, Process, Platform, and why that order matters