Strategy · May 2026
Five questions to ask before you adopt any AI tool
Not every AI tool is worth the hype or the risk. Five questions separate the genuinely useful from the expensive distraction.
AI tools are everywhere, and the pitches are convincing: faster workflows, lower overhead, competitive advantage. Some of it is true and some is noise. Before your organization plugs anything in, here are five questions that separate genuinely useful AI from expensive distraction, and from unnecessary risk.
"We should be using AI" is not a strategy. "We want to cut the time staff spend on routine drafting" is.
1. Where does our data go?
Non-negotiable, and first. When staff paste text into an AI tool, that content goes somewhere, and for many consumer products it may be used to train future models or stored outside your control. For a law firm that could mean client confidences; for a nonprofit, donor information. Before any tool touches your work, understand, clearly and in writing, where the data goes and who can see it. Enterprise versions of most major tools offer stronger protections. They cost more. They are worth it.
2. Who will actually use this?
AI tools do not implement themselves. The organizations that get the most from AI figure out which staff have the right tasks, interest, and judgment, then build workflows around those people. A tool nobody uses is wasted money; a tool everybody uses without training is a liability.
3. What specific problem are we solving?
"We should be using AI" is not a strategy. "We want to cut the time staff spend drafting routine client communications" is. The more specific the problem, the easier it is to tell whether a tool actually solves it, and to measure whether it did.
4. What does a mistake cost us?
AI makes mistakes, generating plausible text that can be wrong, imprecise, or off-brand. For a first-pass internal email, that is a minor inconvenience; for a client-facing legal document, a grant application, or a regulatory filing, it has real consequences. Know the cost of an error before you decide how much human review to keep, for high-stakes work, AI is a drafting assistant, not a replacement for expert review.
5. How will we know if it is working?
Define success before you start, time saved per week, a reduction in a specific task, staff satisfaction with a workflow. Without a baseline, you cannot tell whether the tool delivers value or just adds complexity.
The common thread
None of these require a technology background, just honest thinking about your work, risks, and goals. We help Triad organizations work through exactly this, as part of practical AI adoption guidance, before they commit to anything.
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