We hosted a Walk West Live session in July 2026 with Greg Boone, our CEO, and Erica Rooney, our Chief People Officer, sitting down to work through the questions we hear most from clients and prospects. By the end, it was clear what's holding most companies back: three decisions leadership hasn't made yet, not a shortage of AI tools.
The three AI decisions you need to make this year:
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Where AI goes first
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Who owns the workflow
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What stays human
Watch the full conversation above.
AI Decision 1: Where does AI go first?
Start with the friction points: the repetitive, administrative work people already want off their plate. Almost everything else looks like an AI opportunity too, which is the trap. Greg's advice borrows from what MIT calls the forgiveness continuum: keep the first experiments away from customer-facing work, where a misstep can cost you a client, and toward the low-visibility busywork nobody will miss if it breaks.
Erica's version of the same idea starts with people instead of process. Find someone's "aha moment," the task AI removes that they never liked doing anyway, and adoption takes care of itself. Knowledge workers spend an estimated 50 to 60 percent of their week searching for information, copying and pasting, and reformatting data. That's the target worth going after first: whatever task repeats the most across the week.
AI Decision 2: Who owns the workflow?
Name one owner for the outcome before handing a system a goal and a set of tools. Greg's rule is blunt: "It can't be four people." This is where most AI initiatives stall and are buried: an outcome nobody was accountable for from the start.
The bigger shift underneath that is what it does to job descriptions. Agents get defined by outcomes from day one. People, historically, get hired around a list of tasks. Greg and Erica argue that gap is closing fast. The org chart questions coming out of it, like who owns this budget, this update, this outcome, are further along in some companies than others.
AI Decision 3: What stays human?
Keep humans in the moments where the stakes are highest and empathy is the deliverable, then use AI everywhere else to buy back time for those moments. Erica and Greg call the short list of what doesn't automate the five C's: creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. Erica pointed to an example from the insurance industry: a leader she interviewed refuses to ever let a machine answer a call from someone who just lost a family member. That call center is one of the easiest functions in the business to automate. She won't touch it anyway.
Underneath all of it is trust. Erica put it simply: "The goal is not to get everybody rolling the same speed. The goal is to get everybody rolling the same direction." A Harris Poll survey with the Milken Institute backs that up: 87 percent of business leaders call AI workforce readiness a top-three priority, while 68 percent of workers say they're navigating the transition largely on their own. That gap is the whole conversation in one stat.
Watch the session above, then go deeper. We built an interactive breakdown of all three decisions so you can work through where your own organization stands.
If your leadership team is wrestling with any of these three, that's exactly the work we do at Walk West. See how we approach AI enablement and execution, or get in touch with our team and we'll talk through where you're stuck.