Where Should Your Company Start with AI? Find the Asymmetric Opportunity First

When a company asks me where to start with AI, I'm always looking for the same thing: the lowest-hanging fruit.

And I mean something specific: an asymmetric opportunity. The one area where deploying a tool, a workflow, or a simple AI-enabled process would have an outsized impact on your business — and where the cost of getting there, in time, energy, and change management, stays low.

High impact. Low friction. That combination is rarer than you'd think. But when you find it, you've found your first move.

For a $40M distributor, it might be a daily briefing that flagged which accounts had gone quiet before any rep caught it. Minimal setup. No retraining. Real impact on retention.

For another, it might be capturing what their best regional manager knew before he retired. One structured, AI-assisted process. Knowledge that would've walked out the door otherwise... and now lives inside an internal knowledge base other managers can query.

Here's what I've found: once you apply this filter, the answer surfaces pretty fast. Most companies already have a gut sense of where it is. They just haven't named it yet.