The AI adoption ladder
Four rungs. Find the one that sounds like you right now, then take the one next step under it. You don't need to skip ahead. The next rung is the whole job.
Rung 1: Dabbler
You've opened ChatGPT or Claude a few times. It felt like a party trick. You're not sure what it's actually for in your business, and you half suspect it's hype.
Your next step: pick one boring task from this week, a reply you're dreading or notes you need to clean up, and ask AI to take a first pass. One task. See what happens.
Rung 2: Casual user
You reach for AI sometimes, usually for a quick draft or a question. It helps, but it's hit or miss, and you redo a lot of what it gives you.
Your next step: build your business brief and save it as a Claude Project. Most of the "miss" comes from AI not knowing your context. Fix that once.
Rung 3: Confident delegator
You know what AI is good at and you hand it real work. You catch its mistakes. What you don't have yet is a system, so every task still starts from scratch.
Your next step: take one recurring job and run it through the four skills. Turn it into a workflow you reuse, not a one-off.
Rung 4: Fluent operator
AI is woven into how you work. You delegate clearly, you judge output fast, and you stay responsible for what goes out. The question now is leverage: which bigger pieces of your operation could run this way.
Your next step: map your whole week into what to keep, what to hand off, and what to build a real system around. This is where a build session earns its keep.
Not sure which rung, or what your next step really is?
Bring it to a free 20-minute call. We'll find where you are and the one move that's worth making next.
About the framework
The four skills are drawn from the AI Fluency Framework developed by Prof. Rick Dakan (Ringling College of Art and Design) and Prof. Joseph Feller (University College Cork), released under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.