AI Project Starts

You’re Starting in the Wrong Place

Last week I wrote about the gap between having an AI strategy and actually doing anything with it. The response was a lot of variations on the same email: “Yes. This is us. Now what?”

So let’s get into it. Let’s begin with the most common mistake I see. It’s so frequent that I’d wager your current AI project is making it too.

Most AI projects start with the tool.

Someone brings a demo to leadership. Or a vendor comes in with a deck. Or a board member forwards an article. Budget gets allocated for a platform. A pilot gets spun up. A cross-functional team gets pulled together. Six months later, the tool is in place, the team is “using it,” and nobody can tell you what actually changed.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s an architectural problem, and it’s sitting right at the beginning of your project.

The 5P lens

We run every strategic project, AI or otherwise, through a five-step lens called the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™. It’s five questions, in order: Purpose, People, Process, Platform, Performance.

The order matters more than anything else in the framework, and the order is almost always violated.

Here’s what the five mean in plain language:

• Purpose. What is the measurable question we’re trying to answer? Not “use AI.” Not “modernize our stack.” A specific, testable question. “Can we reduce the time the team spends drafting first-pass customer emails by 50% without reducing response quality?” That’s a Purpose. “Leverage GenAI for customer engagement” is not.
• People. Who is involved, what skills do they have, what skills do they need, what are they willing to change, and do they have the authority to change it? Skills alone aren’t enough. Willingness alone isn’t enough. Authority alone isn’t enough. You need all three.
• Process. How does the work flow through the organization today — and how will it flow through it after AI enters the picture? What are the handoffs, the QA steps, the decision points, and the escalation paths?
• Platform. Which tools, systems, and data will support this? This is where most AI projects start, and this is the fourth question, not the first.
• Performance. How will we measure whether any of it worked? Back against the Purpose we started with. The loop closes, or we learn nothing.

The 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ stands out because it starts and ends with Purpose and Performance. Most other frameworks skip these crucial steps. Most frameworks start somewhere in the middle and stop before the end. You execute the plan faithfully and still have no idea whether it was worth doing.

Why most AI projects start at Platform

Because Platform is the fun part. Demos are shiny. Pilots feel like progress. Picking a tool feels like a decision. Nobody gets fired for running a pilot.

Purpose is hard. Purpose requires you to commit to a specific, measurable outcome before you know whether you can hit it. People is hard. People requires you to look at your team honestly and say “do we actually have the skills and the willingness and the authority to make this change.” Process is hard. Process means you have to map how the work is really done, which is almost never how the org chart says it’s done.

Platform is easy. Platform is a Gartner quadrant and a vendor shortlist.

So teams skip the hard parts and start at the Platform. They then try to reverse-engineer a Purpose. This leads to vague, unmeasurable goals like “improve productivity” and “drive innovation.” Then they discover that the People pillar is actually the hard part and start retrofitting training. Then they try to bolt a Performance metric on at the end and realize they have no baseline to compare against.

This is how six months disappear.

The diagnostic

Take one AI initiative you’re running right now. Answer these five questions out loud, in order:

1. What is the specific, measurable question we are answering?
2. Who is doing the work, and do they have the skills, willingness, and authority to do it differently?
3. How does the workflow actually change when AI is in the loop?
4. Which tool or system supports this? And did we pick it because it fit the answers to 1, 2, and 3, or did we pick it first and work backward?
5. How will we know in 90 days whether this actually worked?

If Purpose is unclear and Performance is uncertain (and question 4 feels off ) your project isn’t failing due to execution. It’s failing because it was architected backwards.

The fix isn’t to add more budget or more training or a better vendor. The fix is to go back to Purpose and answer the five questions in the right order. That’s what the 5P Framework is for, and it’s why Purpose and Performance are not negotiable bookends.

Where this plugs in

The 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ is the readiness framework that anchors The AI-Ready Strategist. Next week, I’ll discuss TRIPS. It’s the scoring system we use in Step 3 (Process). This helps us decide which tasks are suited for AI and which are best for humans. Until then:

 The AI-Ready Strategist: trustinsights.ai/aistrategycourse

Are you starting with the Platform? Reply to this email or join the conversation in our Free Slack community, Analytics for Marketers!

– Katie Robbert, CEO

Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.