What did your board ask you to do this quarter?
Each lane is the long version of a real conversation with a CTO or CAIO this year — the framework for the strategy ask, the role-scope for the hire, the audit playbook for governance, the discipline shift for engineering, and the tooling shortlist for capabilities. Pick the brief that matches your Q.
Write us an AI strategy.
Frameworks, roadmap, maturity. What goes in the document, what goes in the appendix, what gets cut — and what survives a Q3 board review.
02 · LEADERSHIPHire a CAIO.
Role scope, comp benchmarks, the 90-day plan. Seven questions for every shortlisted candidate, and the reporting lines that hold.
03 · GOVERNANCEAudit our AI governance.
EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, tooling. The clause template two SaaS renewals failed without, and the CISO-versus-DPO boundary resolved.
04 · ENGINEERINGModernise software engineering.
Code review, testing, platform, maintenance. What changes about how engineering runs once half the code is AI-generated.
05 · CAPABILITIESPick AI capabilities & tooling.
AI-SRE, agents, orchestration, observability. The procurement frame no vendor will draw for you, and the tools that earn their licence.
— · BROWSENone of these match?
Open the full library of 95 briefs across 7 hubs. The most-asked board questions drive the lanes; the rest live one click in.
Latest research
All hubs →AI Agent Use Cases by Business Function: Where Agents Pay Off in 2026
Where AI agents earn their keep in customer service, sales, marketing, finance, HR, procurement, IT and legal: the use cases that work, how much autonomy each should get, the KPI to judge it by, and how to pick the first one and get it from pilot to production.
EssayAI Agent Governance: A Framework for AI That Takes Actions
How to govern AI agents that call tools, move data and act without a human approving each step. Autonomy tiers, agent identity and least privilege, sandbox testing, runtime controls, and the 2026 rules that apply: Singapore's agentic framework, OWASP's agentic Top 10, NIST, the EU AI Act after the omnibus, CCPA ADMT, GDPR and HIPAA.
EssayAI Cost Management: FinOps for AI, TBM, and Tying Spend to Business Results
How to control AI spend and connect it to business outcomes the CFO will accept. FinOps for AI handles the token and GPU bill; Technology Business Management (TBM) handles the allocation to departments and results. A CIO's view on budget splits, showback, and why transparency is what brings departments together.
BriefAI Infrastructure Companies: The Stack, Layer by Layer
A strategy map of the AI infrastructure companies an enterprise depends on, whether or not it buys from them directly: chips, neoclouds, power, cooling, and data center developers and REITs. Where the constraints sit in each layer, and what to ask your providers. Not investment advice.
The hubs
- C1 →
Frameworks
Six widely-cited AI strategy frameworks scored against eight criteria — McKinsey, Microsoft CAF, Gartner, Databricks, IBM watsonx, and the operator-built four-question diagnostic. Honest about what each gets wrong.
- C2 →
Roadmap
Once an AI strategy exists, the question becomes the order in which to do the work. The roadmap cluster covers the discretionary-to-operating-budget transition, the six- and eighteen-month horizons, mid-programme pivots, and the difference between an AI transformation and an AI strategy with a louder cover sheet.
- C3 →
Maturity
Six AI maturity models — Gartner, Microsoft CAF, MITRE, CNA, Deloitte, and an operator-built version — plotted against one set of axes. Target maturity stage is conditional on strategic posture, not absolute.
- C4 →
Governance
What enterprise AI governance actually requires in 2026 — the EU AI Act August deadline, the NIST/ISO alphabet soup, the 35-tool platform market, and the CAIO/CISO/DPO boundary that breaks most programmes. Written by someone who has run the programmes, not audited them.
- C5 →
Roles
Should you hire a Chief AI Officer? Where does the role sit, what does the first 90 days look like, and where is the CAIO ↔ CTO ↔ CIO boundary. Written for executives deciding the org-chart question, not selling the search.
- C6 →
Capabilities
The serious AI coding tools market has compressed to four enterprise contenders, two emerging agents, and a handful of IDE plays. The strategic question is not which is best — it is who decides, what is actually being procured, and what the licence-versus-API split does to the budget twelve months in. Written for the VPE, the CIO, and the platform lead who will own the consequences.
- C7 →
Software Eng
What AI is doing to software engineering as a discipline, not a procurement line: the code review, testing, maintenance, and platform shifts a VP owns.
Editor & principal author
Thomas Prommer
The AI Strategy Guide is edited by Thomas Prommer — twenty years as CIO and CTO, with AI programs run and audited across European media and technology groups. Briefs are operator-written and editorially reviewed before they publish, so the opinion is foregrounded and the trade-offs are named, not buried. Prommer was named HotTopics Global CIO 2026 and to the 2026 CTO Craft 100.