AXHUB5 cards

Getting started with AX

Half a year since someone said "shouldn't we be doing AI too?"
Many teams are still exactly where they were.
Here are five things the organizations that succeeded actually did.

Drawn from Stanford's analysis of 51 successful deployments, surveys at home and abroad, and field accounts

Getting started with AX1 / 5

One problem before "adopting AI"

A project that starts with "let's do AI too" ends after one demo.
The ones that succeeded went the other way.
They wrote down one annoying problem first, and looked for tools later.

The first question in small-business consulting is always the same.
"What problem do you want to solve?"

Try writing it like this Instead of "we'll adopt AI at work" —
"Phone inquiries take half a day on average to answer → within 1 hour"
"Repeat visits from regulars dropped → handle review replies and return invitations same-day"

Source The shared consulting principle across government small-business AI support programs — defining a concrete problem is step 1

Getting started with AX2 / 5

Start with the easy tasks

The first target is a task with clear inputs that repeats every time.
Meeting notes, inquiry triage, weekly-report drafts.

Tasks that carry judgment and accountability (appraisals, strategy) come last.
The first win has to be easy for a second one to follow.

Something you could try today "From this meeting transcript, put just the decisions, action items, and owners into a table"
"Sort this week's 50 customer inquiries into shipping / refund / how-to / other"

Source Criteria for automation fit — clear inputs and regular patterns (workflow automation guide)

Getting started with AX3 / 5

A person checks at the end

It doesn't mean everything goes out on autopilot.
The AI handles most of it, and a person only looks at the ambiguous ones.

For review replies — the AI drafts, and the owner personally handles only the low-star ones.
Across 51 success cases, this approach beat item-by-item approval by more than double.

Source Stanford Enterprise AI Playbook (51 deployments) — median productivity gain 71% vs 30%

Getting started with AX4 / 5

Other people's habits rarely change

The wiki bot that told the team to change its search habits became a one-person tool within a month.
What survived was the opposite.
A tool that cut the repetitive work people did in Slack, inside Slack.

People don't want to learn a new tool.
They want the work they already do to go faster.

Self-check "To use this tool, what does a teammate have to learn from scratch?"
The closer the answer is to "nothing," the longer it survives.

Source Accounts from working developers on in-house automation (JobKorea) — the difference between tools that lived and died

Getting started with AX5 / 5

One a week, 90 days

Trying to change everything with a single kickoff rarely sticks.
A realistic pace is one workflow a week.
Week 1 meeting notes, week 2 inquiry triage, week 3 quotes.

For teams under 10, 45 days was enough.
Spend on adoption more than tools — the organizations that succeeded spent 1 to 9.

Source 90-day rollout playbook (week by week) · "1 tech cost : 9 change management" (Accenture Federal, Axios)

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The difference was
in the organization, not the tech

The same customer-support redesign task.
A tech company shipped in 6 months; a large bank answered "years just to stand it up."
Same model, same task.

The only difference was the five above.

See the source material on axhub.net

All sources are collected in the AXHub case library — Stanford Digital Economy Lab, government support-program notices, field accounts, Accenture Federal (Axios)

This card is built on AXHub's verified case library. The instructions in the example boxes are sample lines to follow, and figures follow each card's source at the bottom.