Our leadership team wants to establish an AI committee to explore company-wide innovation, but it sounds like a massive distraction. How do we kill the internal theater and keep AI strictly focused on operational friction?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Disband the committee immediately. AI committees in privately held operating companies produce slide decks, product demos, and endless philosophical debates, but zero bottom-line results.

Never sell AI inside your business or treat it as a standalone discipline. Instead, pitch operational improvements that machine learning happens to enable, mentioning the technical architecture only as a footnote. Your leadership team should treat automation tools identically to any other operational asset, such as a forklift, a delivery truck, or an accounting package.

To eliminate the theater and keep your team focused on real business friction, run the work through your existing EOS® cadence:

- Identify the real issue. During your weekly Level 10 Meeting™, look at the Scorecard measurables that are lagging or customer delivery bottlenecks on the Issues List. Apply IDS® to pinpoint the root cause.
- Set a concrete Rock. If solving that bottleneck requires an automated workflow, assign a single quarterly Rock to one department leader on the Accountability Chart. Do not give it to a committee. One person owns the result.
- Measure the operational outcome, not the tech. The success metric of the Rock cannot be testing three tools. It must be a tangible operational standard, such as cutting dispatch prep time by fifty percent.

When you force every technical conversation through operational problems and Scorecard measurables, the theater stops and execution begins.