Last week I presented to a group of leaders from across industries on how to build an agentic AI workflow.

We spent a good chunk of time on why thinking in workflows is where the real leverage is. When you stop using AI to answer individual questions and start using it to redesign how work gets done end-to-end, the economics shift completely.

The questions and hesitations I heard in that room reinforced something I've been building out for a while. A construct for thinking about AI adoption across an organization. Not just individually, but at scale, as a leadership team.

I'm sharing that framework here today.

And I'd love to understand where your organization sits right now. Are you actively driving AI adoption across your team? Or watching it unfold and wondering where to start?

Book a free Clarity Audit and let's map it together. We'll identify where your team is and where to focus first.

Tier 1 is chat. ChatGPT Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Claude Enterprise, Gemini Enterprise, Perplexity Enterprise. You open it, you type, it responds. No workflow redesign required.

Think of it like GPS. The app tells you which turn to take. You still drive. AI helps you think faster, write faster, and get unstuck. That's the value, and it's real.

This is the "AI helps you think" tier. It covers 100% of your workforce. Not as an experiment. As a baseline expectation.

Tier 2 is where companies get stuck, and it’s also where most of the ROI lives.

Tier 2 is workflow tools: Make Enterprise, Zapier Enterprise, n8n Enterprise, Relevance AI, Claude Cowork. You're not just having a conversation with AI. You're building systems where AI executes tasks end-to-end, connects tools, and produces outputs that used to require a person.

The GPS analogy breaks here. This is the "AI helps you execute" tier. AI stops helping you think and starts helping you run the work.

About 10-20% of your workforce has the interest and technical comfort to work at this level. I call them super users. Zapier's Wade Foster calls them Super ICs: individual contributors already doing the work of two or three people because of how they've built their AI workflows.

Section AI’s January 2026 AI Proficiency Report shows only 3% of employees have reached this tier. Meanwhile, 70% are classified as “AI experimenters” — still using AI the way they’d use Google: chat, ask, move on. No workflow change, no sustained output change.¹

That 67-point gap is the single biggest opportunity in enterprise AI right now.

Tier 3 is the custom AI stack: proprietary data, enterprise AI platforms, model providers, APIs, and agent orchestration working together. This is the "AI powers the business" tier.

It requires D&A, IT, and engineering resources. It's expensive to build and slow to validate. And it's the right choice for a specific type of problem: high-stakes, high-volume decisions where proprietary data creates advantage you can't get any other way.

The mistake isn't pursuing Tier 3. The mistake is pursuing Tier 3 before building Tier 2.

Most leadership teams fail AI transformation in one of two ways. The first: getting capped at Tier 1. Everyone has a license, usage numbers look decent, and then the ROI conversation goes nowhere.

The second: jumping straight to Tier 3. A large initiative run by the data science team that takes 18 months and produces something the rest of the business doesn't know how to use.

Both paths produce the same result.

Section AI’s research found that 85% of employees don’t have a value-driving AI use case. All that usage, no business outcome. That number comes from companies doing Tier 1 well and skipping everything else.¹

The missing piece is Tier 2.

Tier 2 is where individual productivity becomes team productivity. It's where people stop saying "AI helps me think faster" and start saying "AI runs our vendor onboarding." It's where the 3% who know how to build things teach the next 17%.

Not everyone on your team needs to operate at every tier. But every leader needs to know which tier their people are at.

This framework is really about user types: who on your team uses AI to think, who is ready to build with it, and where a targeted infrastructure investment makes sense.

The super users who reach Tier 2 don't need to be technical. They just need to be curious enough to experiment and motivated enough to build workflows others can use. They're already on your team. The framework helps you find them.

Know which tier your team is actually operating at?

If you're not sure, that's worth 60 minutes to figure out. The Clarity Audit is free, no pitch, no commitment required. We dig into where your team's time actually goes, and I send you a follow-up report with your top 1-3 workflows to fix first. The report is yours to keep.

Sources:

See you next week - Purti

Clarity Prompts - The weekly AI operating system for sharper leaders.