AI Is Ready. Organizations Aren’t.

Hello, and happy Sunday! This week the consulting team published two practical guides. Mike Taylor built on engineer Steve Yegge’s viral post to map the eight levels of AI adoption—with sample prompts and signals for when to move up—and Natalia Quintero (who’s talked to leadership teams at hundreds of organizations) laid out a foolproof five-step process for executives rolling out AI across their companies. Covering Microsoft Build, Mike argued that enterprise adoption lags the news cycle—a gap he sees up close with the enterprise clients he advises. He also made a counterargument to Dan Shipper’s essay about the future of work, “After Automation.”

Spiral 4.0 shipped this week: Every’s writing tool can now draft in your voice from inside any agent, with a price cut to match. Elsewhere, Figma’s Matt Colyer makes the case that the SaaSpocalypse is overblown, designer Daniel Rodrigues shares a two-tool image generators workflow, Monologue general manager Naveen Naidu has a system for making coding agents more efficient with custom local skills, and the team names its most annoying model output.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

“The Eight Levels of AI Adoption” by Mike Taylor and Laura Entis/Guides: A framework mapping every stage of AI adoption, from Level 1 (a chatbot you ask and it answers) to Level 8 (an orchestrator agent that runs a team of sub-agents), with example prompts and guidance on when to move up. A higher level isn’t automatically better—the right level for a task depends on how much you trust the AI to run without intervention and how costly a mistake would be. A companion essay lets you figure out which level you’re on. Read this for where you stand today and what it takes to move up a level.

“An Executive’s Guide to Implementing AI” by Natalia Quintero/Guides: AI adoption isn’t being held back by the models—it’s the organization. Natalia Quintero, head of Every Consulting, gives executives who’ve bought the tools but aren’t seeing returns a five-step framework, laid out as a 60-day plan—with a companion essay that previews it. Read this for the five steps and how to run them.

“How Microsoft Is Building for a World of Metered Intelligence” by Mike Taylor/Also True for Humans: Reporting from Microsoft Build, Mike Taylor argues that Microsoft is the first big company to design for a world where intelligence is metered and the era of subsidized AI subscriptions is ending. Its response includes automatic model routing, a laptop that runs AI locally, and cheaper, smaller models. Read this for a ground-level look at AI’s post-subsidy era.