Embracing AI
Adoption against commercial benefit. Adoption without direction is expensive noise.
Embracing AI is the third theme of the Value Edge Diagnostic, and its first sentence is the one most sales organisations have not yet accepted: AI is not a technology question. It is a commercial question. The horizontal axis is adoption, meaning whether use has moved beyond experimentation into consistent, purposeful application in the work that matters. The vertical axis is commercial benefit, meaning quantifiable outcomes for your business and, visibly, for your customers.
The four boxes carry the names they deserve. Blissful Ignorance is low on both. Dazed and Confused is high adoption with nothing to show for it, the licences bought and the pilots run and the pipeline exactly where it was. Potential Untapped Advantage is the rarer case of benefit without breadth, one team quietly winning. Business Powered by AI is the target, and the account teams that reach it are the ones who treated the three registers as three different jobs rather than one tool.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapter 2 and Appendix A.
Related terms
The Value Edge Diagnostic
Thirty-two questions across four themes that place your business on a value maturity map. A mirror, not a report card.
AI fluency
Comfort with the tools, held alongside knowledge of the customer. Hold only the second and you are slow; hold only the first and you are fast, fluent and confidently wrong.
The three registers
Productive, creative, collaborative: three different jobs AI can do for an account team. Not a maturity ladder, and the collaborative one needs an expert in the loop.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.