AI with ALLIE

The professional’s guide to quick AI bites for your personal life, work life, and beyond.

It has been my job for years to parachute into my Fortune 500 clients and triage their biggest AI blockers, and I start with an assessment. This is the first time that I’m opening up this assessment to the public. Your AI strategy 100% starts with awareness. And my goal is to bring that clarity to each and every one of you.

If I were to call on some of you, my guess is your companies are all at wildly different stages of AI adoption today - some businesses have used AI to make millions, some have used it to save millions, and some have used it to generate 20 cartoons of their boss (and to that person I say, hats off to ya).

The two biggest things that can kill your business when it comes to AI are overconfidence and underestimation.

An overconfident company, when you dig in, may have shaky foundations. It usually has an enterprise ChatGPT or Copilot license, a bunch of siloed projects, people using AI daily or weekly for low-grade productivity like writing emails, at least two departments who aren’t bought in, a CEO that barely uses AI, and an exec team that has said the word “AI agents” 40 times but doesn’t really know what it means.

Alternatively, your company might be doing genuinely impressive work: real agents handling real workflows, hours of productivity gains every single day. And yet your leaders are completely convinced the sky is falling and that the company is 10 years behind everyone else.

Almost nobody, in any camp, is standing where they think they're standing.

I've been chewing on why that is for months, and then Pew Research dropped a big new study recently, "Americans and AI 2026," and it basically handed me the answer. So let’s review it together.

The confidence numbers don’t line up with reality

About half of US adults (49%) now use AI chatbots, up from a third just two years ago. So yes we're getting on the train, but only 18% of all US adults surveyed say they're extremely or very confident using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. Among the people who use AI, that's still only about 37%. And we’re still not even talking about AI agents. So call it a third of users who feel solid. And I say this with love, but I'd bet at least half of that "very confident" group aren’t nearly as capable in these systems as they think they are or as they could be.

ChatGPT is still the most popular chatbot by a high margin, with 44% of adults vs. Gemini at 24% and Claude at 6%. But the genuinely powerful stuff (agent harnesses like Codex, Claude Code, the agents that can take entire tasks and workflows off your plate and ping you when they're done) barely registers at all.

People are judging AI without knowing what it can do

63% of US adults think AI is moving too quickly. 2% think it's too slow (I’m pretty sure these are people that drink 4 Celsius a day, because how can you think AI development is going slowly these days??). Across the whole study, people believe AI will negatively impact everyone else harder than it impacts them. 40% of US adults predict the impact on society in the next 20 years will be negative. But negative on themselves, personally? Only 31%. It's the exact same wiring as "other people will get their identity and data stolen, not me," and it shows up everywhere in this data.

In a separate research effort, KPMG spoke with 2145 senior leaders from 20 different countries and found that organizations with clearly defined accountability for AI reported established ROI at 3x the rate of those without it (14% vs 4%). KPMG also found that 78% of surveyed senior leaders expect AI fluency to become more important and believe roles will change for employees who do not develop AI fluency.

My take on this: it’s largely a visibility problem (hint: which is exactly why I built the AI-First Index Assessment). Smart, capable people land in both camps constantly. You can only measure yourself against what you can see - your own office, your own feed, the tools you happen to have used. If everyone you work with and follow online is shipping agents before breakfast and posting their Claude Code receipts, it's unsurprising if you feel like you're drowning. If nobody around you has touched a real agent, it's just as easy to swing the other way and assume you're ahead (you’re probably even known as the “AI person”).

Your circle is not the right benchmark. You might be stuck in a local minimum. And I want you to get the truth about your company’s AI capabilities today and how to set yourself up for success to better prepare for the next 10 years.

When you can see the gap, you can close the gap

If you want to run faster, you should know your current sprint time. If you want to make more money, you should know how much you make today. If you want to reduce cholesterol, you better go get your blood tested.

Our ability to grow and stretch as humans, groups, and society often includes an uncomfortable, unglamorous deep look at ourselves. How are we ACTUALLY doing? Have we been kidding ourselves for the last 2 years? Are we really thriving? Do people know what they’re doing? Am I leading people in the wrong direction? What the hell is an AI agent?!?! (I’m kidding, I know that one.)

Find that clarity. Once it comes into focus, the path forward often shows itself too. And believe me: the gap is closable. Most of you reading this can leap ahead in the next few months. You just need something to measure yourself against other than the room you happen to be sitting in.

I built an assessment for my advisory clients called the AI-First Index. It gives an honest, specific read on how AI-ready you and your team are right now, measured against where AI really is in 2026. It scores your company across 16 dimensions of how you build and run an AI-first organization: your foundation, capabilities, governance, people, and execution - plus what to do about it. It's about a 10-minute assessment, the first results are free, and it works by asking how your company really operates and scoring from there. It has always been a closed-door, private-client thing, but now for the first time, I'm opening it up to everyone.

Take the AI-First Index today

This assessment gives you the clarity you need. It's a comprehensive view of where you stand across all 16 dimensions based on our Fortune 500 AI advising work. Not where you think you are. Not where your CEO guesses that you are. Where you actually are, and exactly what to do about it.

Stay curious, stay informed,

Allie

P.S. if you’re the one that’s been handed the task of “make our company AI-first”, then speak to my team about how we can help you make it happen faster than you can alone.

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