AI Adoption Strategy
Most companies have the tools. The difference between experimentation and adoption is the foundation underneath. I help leadership teams build the organizational infrastructure that turns AI investments into real value.
Start the ConversationIn 2025, 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives — up from 17% the year before. Technology deployed without strategic intent tied to business outcomes isn’t adoption. It’s spend.
Source: S&P Global Market IntelligenceYou’ve paid for the licenses. If your people don’t understand what’s in it for them, adoption stalls.
No amount of automation will fix broken fundamentals. AI amplifies what’s already there — which means the foundation has to come first. Get that right, and everything built on top of it compounds.
The licenses are paid for. The tools are available. But most employees either don’t know how to use them, don’t feel they have permission to, or are quietly wondering if they’re training their replacements. Meanwhile, engineering, marketing, and sales are each running their own experiments — duplicating costs, building in silos. And IT is watching shadow AI proliferate, counting the days until a data exposure incident.
This isn’t an AI problem. AI just made it visible.
You have leadership, teams, institutional knowledge, and business context no vendor can replicate. What’s missing is the structure that lets all of it work together. I help leadership teams build that structure — governance, enablement, and strategic alignment that turns scattered AI experimentation into real adoption. You don’t need a Fortune 500 budget to get this right.
Prepare Your Business
An AI Council gives every business area a voice in how AI shows up in the organization — not by decree, but by consensus. Clear standards for what’s allowed, what isn’t, and who owns what. Structure that lets you move fast without moving recklessly.
Prepare Your People
Every employee is asking a question nobody has answered: what does this mean for me? Until that’s addressed, adoption stalls — regardless of what you’ve bought. HR sits at the table from day one. Not as an afterthought. As a design requirement.
Prepare Your Foundation
Software should serve the business — not the other way around. When the foundation is solid, technology becomes a choice. Not a crisis. Build it right, and you decide which tools serve the business — on your terms, not your vendor’s.
A global cybersecurity company. Approximately 100 people across two continents. Every department eager to adopt AI — moving fast, exploring tools, pulling leadership into the conversation. That energy is exactly what you want. But without coordination, it leads somewhere predictable: competing licenses, duplicated spend, and no collective bargaining power with vendors. The AI Council headed all of that off before it started.
AI Council
Every senior leader with a voice and a vote. Integrated into the existing quarterly review — no new meetings on already-stretched calendars. Governance that stuck because it was built by the people who had to live with it.
Foundation First
AI-powered analysis across ad platforms, web analytics, CRM, and site performance. One top-performing campaign had a 100% bounce rate. Killed immediately. If you can’t convert leads, that’s not an AI problem. That’s a foundation problem.
Founder, Blackmer Advisory and former CMO with nearly 30 years of experience across IT, cybersecurity sales, product management, and marketing who led company-wide AI adoption strategy across a global organization. When I’m in the room with your teams, I’m not learning their language. I already speak it.
Let’s Talk
My job is to make your organization capable, not dependent. That means building something your team owns and can run — not a relationship where the work stops when I leave. If you’re past “should we use AI?” and hitting walls on what comes next, let’s figure out where you actually are and what comes next.