AI for Executives Capstone Exercise — AI for Executives and Senior Leaders

What you'll learn

Apply the vocabulary, questions, and instincts from across this course in a single realistic executive scenario
Produce a board-ready AI briefing that reflects genuine critical evaluation, not vendor talking points
Self-assess your output against the leadership-judgment standard this course has built

This course has covered the AI vocabulary that lets you follow a technical conversation, how to read a vendor proposal critically, the questions to ask a technical team, a first-pass build-versus-buy-versus-wait instinct, the risk vocabulary that lets you name what a colleague or lawyer is actually raising, how to frame an update for a board, how to spot AI-washing, the baseline data and privacy questions every leader must ask, and how to lead a team through adoption honestly. The capstone brings all of it together in the scenario every new AI sponsor eventually faces: presenting your first AI initiative to the board.

Capstone Exercise

Your First AI Board Briefing

Context

You are a divisional Vice President at a mid-size company. Three months ago, you approved a pilot of an AI-powered customer-inquiry triage tool, pitched by the vendor as '90% accurate at routing inquiries to the correct department, based on results from our enterprise customers.' The pilot has now run for ten weeks across one regional customer service team. Early results: the tool correctly routes about 78% of inquiries in your specific deployment, the remaining 22% require a human to re-route, and one team member privately flagged that inquiries mentioning a competitor's product name are being misrouted at a noticeably higher rate than others — a pattern nobody has yet formally investigated. The board has asked for a fifteen-minute AI update at next week's meeting, and this is your first time presenting an AI initiative to them.

Your Task

Draft your board briefing in four parts. Part 1: a one-paragraph statement applying the three-question board framework from Lesson 6 — where AI creates value for your business, what is actually live and its real measured result (not the vendor's original 90% claim), and your priority and main risk for the next quarter. Part 2: a short written response to the gap between the vendor's claimed 90% accuracy and your actual measured 78%, including the specific follow-up question you would now ask the vendor. Part 3: an assessment of the competitor-name misrouting pattern using the correct risk vocabulary term from Lesson 5, and what you would do about it before the board meeting, not after. Part 4: a two-sentence plan for how you would communicate the pilot's real (imperfect) results to the customer service team without either overstating success or discouraging them, applying the framework from Lesson 9.

Your notes (optional)

Deliverable

A four-part written response covering the board briefing paragraph, the vendor follow-up question, the risk assessment of the misrouting pattern using correct vocabulary, and the two-sentence team communication plan.

Quick check

Part 2 says it is not enough to observe that your measured 78 percent falls short of the vendor's claimed 90 percent. What does the capstone want you to put to the vendor instead?

Select one answer.

Key takeaways

A confident vendor claim and your own organization's measured result are two different things — the gap between them is exactly what this course has trained you to notice and act on.
A board update is a statement of position and risk, not a technical briefing — lead with the three-question structure before any supporting detail.
An unexplained performance gap tied to a specific pattern, like the competitor-name example, is a bias signal worth investigating before it reaches a customer-facing consequence, not after.
How you communicate an imperfect but real result to your own team shapes whether the next AI initiative gets a fair hearing or an exhausted one.
The judgment this course has built — critical reading, precise questions, named risk, honest communication — is what makes the deeper frameworks in a dedicated AI strategy course usable rather than theoretical.

Where to Go Next

If your role involves sponsoring AI adoption decisions at scale — assessing organizational readiness, building a formal use-case prioritization process, managing implementation and ROI measurement, or leading AI-enabled teams through a multi-year transformation — the natural next step is AI Strategy for Leaders, this catalog's advanced certificate course for executives and directors who already have the working AI literacy this course builds and are ready for the deeper strategic frameworks.

If your role sits closer to compliance, risk, or governance execution rather than strategic sponsorship, AI Governance and Compliance and its own beginner on-ramp, AI Compliance Foundations, may be the more relevant next step.