AI is creating opportunities right across business, but that doesn’t mean every opportunity deserves the same attention or investment. From my perspective, business focus on AI starts with three questions:
- Where could AI genuinely make a difference?
- Where could it remove unnecessary work?
- Can customers still find your business as the way they search and research changes?
These questions lead to the three areas that I think deserve a place on most leadership agendas: AI strategy and training, Agentic AI and automation, and AI search visibility.
They are connected, but they solve very different problems. More pertinently, you don’t necessarily need to tackle all three at once. The key question is: which one matters most to your business right now?
1. Where should we invest in AI?
This is probably the question I hear most often from business leaders.
There is no shortage of AI tools, opinions or promises. The harder part is working out which of them actually deserve your time, money and attention.
For many organisations, the first business focus on AI therefore needs to be understanding rather than implementation.
How do you build an AI strategy for your business?
A good AI strategy starts with the business, not the technology. Look at what you are trying to achieve, the problems that get in the way, and the areas where better information, faster decisions or less manual effort could make a meaningful difference.
Only then should you start looking at the AI available to help.
That might sound obvious, but the pace of AI development makes it very easy to do things the other way around: see an impressive tool, decide you should be using it and then go looking for a problem it might solve. There is plenty of that going on at the moment.
The more important question for a leadership team is:
Where could AI create enough value to justify changing the way we work?
That moves the discussion away from experimentation for its own sake and towards priorities.
Do business leaders need AI training?
Yes, although not because every CEO needs to become an AI expert.
Leaders need enough knowledge to make informed decisions. They need to understand what AI can and cannot do, where the risks sit, what good use looks like and when somebody is selling them a very expensive answer to a fairly ordinary problem.
Training also creates a shared language across the business. When leadership, marketing, finance, HR and operational teams all have a different understanding of what AI means, it becomes difficult to decide where to invest.
That is why our AI courses are designed around business roles and decisions, rather than teaching AI as an abstract subject.
For some organisations, this is the most important starting point: get the leadership team comfortable with the possibilities, identify the strongest opportunities and build an AI strategy around business value rather than enthusiasm.
2. Where could AI save us time?
The second pillar is much more operational.
Most businesses contain an extraordinary amount of work that has accumulated over time because “that’s how we do it”. People copy information from one place to another, prepare the same reports every week, chase updates, organise documents, respond to predictable requests and spend hours stitching together processes that were never really designed as processes in the first place.
This is where the business focus on AI moves from deciding what might be possible to identifying what could actually work better.
What is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI describes AI systems that can work towards a goal, complete a series of steps and take permitted actions, rather than simply responding to one prompt at a time.
In business terms, that means AI can start helping with workflows rather than individual tasks.
For example, an AI agent might gather information from several sources, organise it, prepare a summary and route it to the right person. Another might help manage enquiries, check whether information is complete and trigger the appropriate next action.
The technology sounds sophisticated. The business case is often much simpler: can we stop good people spending so much time doing work that is repetitive, administrative or unnecessarily complicated?
Where should businesses use Agentic AI?
The best starting points are usually processes with a lot of repetition and fairly clear rules. If the explanation for a process is still “because that’s how we’ve always done it”, it is probably worth taking a closer look.
Look for work where people regularly:
- move information between systems
- gather and summarise information
- prepare standard documents or reports
- organise tasks and follow-ups
- check status or completeness
- deal with high volumes of similar requests
Not everything should be automated, of course. Judgement, customer relationships, nuance and accountability still matter enormously.
The aim isn’t to remove people from the business. It is to remove some of the work that stops them doing the things you actually employ them for.
For a lot of companies, that may turn out to be one of the strongest cases for AI investment.
3. Can customers find us through AI?
The third pillar is happening outside your organisation whether you choose to engage with it or not.
People are increasingly using tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude and Perplexity to research questions, compare options and understand which businesses or products might meet their needs.
That makes visibility an important business focus on AI, because your customers’ behaviour is changing alongside the technology.
How do you make your business visible in AI search?
Businesses improve their visibility in AI search by making it easier for AI platforms to understand who they are, what they offer, where their expertise sits and why their information is credible.
That depends on more than simply adding a few AI-friendly paragraphs to a website.
Strong website content still matters. So do the foundations of SEO, third-party mentions, authority, consistency and the wider digital footprint surrounding your business.
AI platforms need evidence to work with. Being very good at what you do is no guarantee that an AI platform will work that out for itself.
If your business is barely mentioned beyond its own website, your expertise is poorly explained or different sources describe you in different ways, there is less for an AI system to confidently draw upon.
Do we still need SEO if people are using ChatGPT?
Yes.
SEO hasn’t suddenly stopped mattering. What has changed is the environment around it.
Google remains important, but customers now discover businesses through a wider mix of traditional search, AI-generated results, conversational tools, social platforms, marketplaces and other sources.
That is why our approach is based on Search Everywhere and AI Visibility rather than treating AI search as a completely separate discipline.
Your business focus on AI here should be broader than asking whether your website ranks for a particular keyword. The more useful question is whether your business is being found, understood and represented accurately wherever customers are looking for answers.
How do you appear in ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Claude or Perplexity?
There is no button to press and no guaranteed shortcut.
The objective is to build a credible, consistent body of information that AI systems can discover, understand and cite when your business is relevant to the question being asked.
That means knowing which questions your customers are asking, answering those questions clearly, demonstrating expertise and making sure the wider web supports the story you tell about your business.
It is an extension of good digital marketing, not a replacement for it.
Which AI pillar should your business tackle first?
There is no single answer, because the right business focus on AI depends on the biggest opportunity or problem within your organisation today.
If you are still working out where AI deserves investment, start with strategy and training.
If your teams are losing too much time to repetitive work, inefficient processes or disconnected systems, Agentic AI may deserve attention.
If customers are changing how they research products, services or suppliers and you are unsure whether your business is appearing in those answers, AI visibility should move up the agenda.
Over time, the three areas will increasingly overlap. Better understanding leads to better investment decisions. Better automation helps the business operate more effectively. Better visibility helps ensure that people can still find and understand your business as the way they search changes.
The important thing is not to “do AI” everywhere at once. It is to know what problem you are trying to solve and why it matters.
Three cornerstone pillars for AI in your business
At WSI Digital Advisors, we help businesses approach AI through three cornerstone pillars:
AI strategy and training to help you understand where to invest and build confidence across the business.
Agentic AI and consultancy to identify repetitive work, improve processes and create more efficient ways of working.
Search Everywhere and AI Visibility to help your business be found and understood across Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and the wider search landscape.
You may need one of these today and the others later. You may already be doing well in one area and need help with another.
Either way, the starting point is the same: decide where AI can create the greatest value for your business.
Simply ask WSI Digital Advisors to find out more.
