FIELD BRIEF
76% use AI. Only 14% have embedded it.
The tools are working. The results are real. 93% of SMBs report meaningful impact — and yet most are running AI as a sidekick, not as infrastructure. The gap between adoption and implementation is the whole story right now.
A Field Brief is a structured, one-page distillation of a key strategic question. Each brief diagnoses the root cause, maps where the gap shows up, and closes with a concrete next step — designed to be read in under 5 minutes and acted on immediately.
93% report meaningful impact. 84% cite efficiency gains. And yet most run AI as optional overhead — useful, but not structural. Goldman Sachs, 2025.
"The problem isn't access to AI — it's the absence of a plan to move from experiment to operation."
The implementation gap shows up in four patterns.
Sector
decides.
Tech (78%), legal, and financial services move first. Construction, healthcare, education, government, and traditional retail stall. Physical-world complexity plus unstructured data equals a graveyard of pilots.
Clean data
is the gate.
Digital-first industries have structured, accessible data. Everyone else doesn't. The model doesn't matter if there's nothing clean to feed it — garbage in, garbage out applies at the sector level.
Measure it
or stall.
Legal cut document review timelines by 50–80%. That's structural change. Fast movers can quantify the win — and that number is what gets past middle management and turns a pilot into policy.
Not bigger —
better guided.
The companies crossing the line aren't more resourced. They had the right outside perspective to make the leap from "we use AI sometimes" to "AI is baked into how we operate."
The Move — 30 minutes with Perplexity.
Run these two prompts. You'll know more than most.
From the field.
How AI reshaped legal work — not productivity theater, structural change.
Law firms using AI cut document review timelines by 50–80%. Not by making lawyers faster — by removing the bottleneck entirely. AI reviews. Humans decide.
The brief was clear: reduce review time. Not "explore AI in legal" — reduce review time by X. That specificity is what made implementation possible, not the technology.
Legal documents are inherently structured. No data cleanup phase, no pilot graveyard — direct implementation. The sector's format was the unfair advantage.
The companies crossing the implementation line aren't the ones who know more about AI. They're the ones who stopped waiting and aren't afraid to implement it — with the right support beside them.