Builder, Innovator, or Achiever? Uncover Your True EnterpriseAI Score.

The 5-Stage Roadmap for ScalingAI.

By Suhas Dhekane.

It’s impossible to ignore the constant pressure on businesses to adopt Artificial Intelligence.

Let’s be honest, as your organization moves into 2026, do you notice a shift in strategic investments towards AI?

What about the existing investments

Research suggests that 60% of the companies are still stuck with the execution of Data Strategy and building interoperability for seamless integrations and communications across various teams.

All these initiatives are now being measured based on their effectiveness in the age of AI.

Here are the key strategic questions for investments in 2026 and beyond.

Are existing investments in various transformation projects able to enable AI-Driven Enterprises?

Does your existing investment able to build a competitive AI product? OR does your organization feel that the competitors are way ahead?

Today, I am handing the map that will not just find answers to the above strategic questions but also to make you a leader of the pack. Here is the map to the “Summit”.

So, lets start the climb to the Summit..

Starting at the Base Camp, where you do stand in the AI race? Here is a strategic framework designed to help organizations evaluate and advance their artificial intelligence capabilities.

The 5-Stages - From Base-Camp to Summit

There are various different AI Maturity assessment frameworks that are available like the one from Gartner, Microsoft or MIT. Although, each one defines stages differently, they are all mapping the same objectives.

It does not matter if stage 1 is called Awareness or Ad Hoc, it represents the same “starting point” proving that this is a standardized strategic framework for AI maturity assessment.

Please take a moment to read through the 5-Stages - Awareness and Foundational, Active and Experimental, Operational and Innovation, Systemic and Strategic and lastly Transformation and Pioneering.

The above 5-stages have well-defined diagnostic and operational norms will help you assess your organization maturity to identify technology and skill gaps, cross-team frictions, outdated processes and legacy infrastructure.

Now, you maybe wondering - Why Organizations fail in transformation?

Over years, organizations have partnered with various consulting firms in performing maturity assessments but later on struggled in successfully executing strategic transformation like automating business processes, cloud migrations, building data-driven enterprise.

The main reason being - most of the Maturity Framework guides with the assessment. However, they lack in providing a strategic roadmap in helping organizations mature from one stage to the next stage.

That brings us to the next section - Strategies for a Climb - Advancing from one stage to the next

Each of the Strategies details out a Transition Plan with key metrics like "The Friction" with current stage of maturity, the "end-goal" to advance to the next stage. Each plan not only provide you with actionable steps but also success markers to measure success at each step. Please refer to the transition plans for more details. This section ends with 3 critical enablers across all the stages - Building unified Infrastructure, Talent and Culture Literacy and Strategy and Governance.

As you reach the Summit, I will leave you with the Implementation Cycle that will take you beyond the Summit. As the technology is rapidly evolving, this process becomes a continuum for growth and success.

So, the real takeaway is - you have a map and a strategic plan to advance from base camp to summit - what are you going to do with this map? I leave you with the immediate action plan that will get you started immediately.

For more detailed article please click here- https://bit.ly/4k2TC8K

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stratagem360.substack.com