Stage 1 of 6 · N
Notice: What the market is already telling you
Understand what AI is changing in your industry, market, and organisation, by reading the signals already appearing in customer behaviour, competitor pace, employee friction, and workflow strain. It is the starting point for treating AI as an operating-model shift rather than a tool decision.
- Managerial question
- What is changing around us that we cannot afford to ignore?
- Related engagement
- AI Readiness Diagnostic
The diagnostic question
Which of your three loudest AI-adjacent complaints are structural rather than seasonal, judged on persistence, spread, consequence, and compression?
Notice runs in week one and two of the AI Readiness Diagnostic. We inventory first and judge later, then reduce the noise to two structural signals a board can act on.
Artefacts this stage produces
- The signal set
- Two named structural signals, one sentence each, dated.
- The shadow-AI inventory
- Every active pilot, unofficial tool, and public-model use, by function, without a verdict attached.
Done properly
- Three signals written in one sentence each, each traced to observed behaviour rather than to a vendor briefing.
- A shadow-AI inventory exists: what employees are already using, in which function, on what data.
- Each signal is tested on four axes: persistence, spread, consequence, and compression.
- Someone in the room can say what would have to be true for the signal to be wrong.
Commonly faked
- A slide of industry statistics with no observation from inside the company.
- A trend list assembled from analyst reports and competitor press releases.
- Signals stated as adjectives: disruption, acceleration, transformation.
- The inventory is skipped because nobody wants to know what is already running.
Audit checklist
Take these into your next leadership meeting
If the room cannot answer these without preparation, this stage has not been completed.
- 01Name the three loudest AI-adjacent complaints in the business right now.
- 02For each, is it persistent across quarters or seasonal?
- 03Does it spread across functions or sit in one team?
- 04What is the consequence if it continues for another twelve months?
- 05Is the time available to respond compressing, and on whose clock?
Failure modes
How this stage goes wrong
- Treating a tool launch as a signal.
- Reading the market and never reading the workforce.
- Converting the inventory into a crackdown, which drives usage further underground.
Next step
Run Notice with us
Notice runs in week one and two of the AI Readiness Diagnostic. We inventory first and judge later, then reduce the noise to two structural signals a board can act on.