| # | Element | Family | Type | Owner | Risk | Cost/Effort | Maturity |
|---|
AI isn’t one thing you buy — it’s dozens of building blocks that only work when they fit together. This table borrows the one index we all trust from chemistry and uses it to lay those blocks out on a single screen: what each one is, how it connects to the others, who owns it, and how risky or mature it is. It’s a shared map for a boardroom and an engineering standup to point at the same square and mean the same thing.
Every element is a small card. Four marks tell you most of what you need before you even click.
Click any tile to open a panel with what it is, why it matters, what to watch out for, and what it connects to.
The buttons above the table repaint every tile by a different question. Same map, six points of view.
The Table is the at-a-glance index — great for the big picture and for a LinkedIn-sized screenshot. The Depth Matrix is the same elements as a sortable, filterable list: slice by owner, risk, family, or stage when you need to plan rather than browse.
Switch on the Maturity lens. Green elements are where almost everyone should begin — clean data, prompting, evaluation. Amber is scaling and productionizing. Purple is the advanced, higher-cost frontier. If you’re reaching for a purple tile before the green ones are solid, that’s the conversation to have.
Switch on the Owner lens. CAIO drives AI capability, CISO owns security & risk, CIO owns platform, cost, and integration, and Shared means it only works cross-functionally. Most stalled AI programs are really an ownership gap this lens makes visible.
A good first session: open the Table, run the Maturity lens to pick 3–4 green elements to invest in this quarter, then run the Owner lens to name who’s accountable for each.
The ratings here — risk, cost, and maturity — are sensible starting defaults, not gospel. The real value is tuning them to your own organization and using the shared vocabulary to have sharper conversations.