As boardroom conversations and C-suite discussions increasingly focus on how to become “AI-first,” it’s clear that not all AI is created equal. Tools are proliferating, but they vary widely in their intended uses and potential impact. That not only creates confusion about what to deploy where, when, and how, it also threatens to delay or even derail your AI transformation. We developed the AI Deployment Matrix to ensure that doesn’t happen.

The AI Deployment Matrix is designed to help you lead with clarity and invest with purpose by helping you distinguish between productivity and automation vs. true transformative reinvention. This two-by-two model is both simple and powerful. It enables you to classify how you’re deploying AI, and how those deployments are (or aren’t) moving your company forward.

Each of the four archetypes has its own strengths, limitations, and strategic implications. Here’s a quick look (see Figure 1).

Quadrant 1: Personal productivity AI

Odds are very good you’re already familiar with this category—Personal productivity AI encompasses the chat-based AI assistants that help with writing, research, ideation, coding, summarization, image interpretation, and visualization generation. They’re typically easy to adopt, require little to no integration, and boost productivity on isolated tasks.

They also serve another purpose: They catalyze cultural change by fostering AI fluency. As employees use these tools for various tasks on a trial-and-error basis, they begin to develop a hands-on intuition for how to get the most from the technology. That, in turn, lays the groundwork for advancing to subsequent quadrants, culminating in quadrant 4, which is where true organizational transformation awaits. Therefore, leaders should encourage widespread experimentation with personal productivity AI, particularly among nontechnical employees, because it prepares the company to adopt, adapt, and scale with AI.

Quadrant 2: Amplified intelligence AI

This quadrant comprises AI assistants that are tailored to enterprise data, individual roles, and individual workflows. They empower people with context-rich intelligence by integrating multiple sources and offering guidance in ways that expand an employee’s ability to decide and act.

Amplified intelligence AI spans a wide range of use cases, from HR and IT policy guidance to research and data analysis. The common thread is tailoring: The assistant taps into enterprise knowledge and workflow context to deliver relevant, actionable outputs. Quadrant 2 augments but does not replace human judgment. The employee remains in control but with a reduced manual burden. Workflows that would otherwise be manual, incomplete, or unscientific become rigorous, data-driven processes. This not only results in faster and smarter decisions at the individual level but also boosts the intelligence of the enterprise as a whole.

Quadrant 3: Embedded assistant AI

Increasingly, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management (CRM) vendors are embedding AI capabilities directly into their enterprise software suites. This AI functionality is often configurable by users and designed to automate discrete tasks, such as autofilling records, drafting responses, routing workflows, and flagging exceptions.

This enables companies to achieve a certain level of scale with relatively little adoption friction: The AI capabilities ride on top of tools that employees already use, facilitating quick uptake with little or no training. But that ease of adoption is a double-edged sword, in that, by adhering to existing workflows they often optimize the status quo rather than redefine it. Nonetheless, while falling short of true transformation, embedded assistant AI can be a highly effective part of your AI strategy, especially when applied to tasks that benefit from consistency, speed, and low error tolerance.

Quadrant 4: Digital worker AI

This quadrant represents the point at which AI shifts from a supportive role to an operational partner that is capable of orchestrating and executing complex workflows across teams, departments, and systems. Unlike the lighter forms of AI described above, digital worker AI is about much more than tools alone; it represents the epicenter of enterprise transformation. As such, few if any organizations are equipped to reach quadrant 4 alone. You will almost certainly need third-party expertise to address the interconnected technology, process redesign, and change management issues that enable a successful transformation.

That’s because the systems that comprise digital worker AI are either highly customized or bespoke, purpose-built on a foundation of tailored logic, deeply integrated data pipelines, and cross-functional process mapping. They can execute entire workflows, make decisions, manage exceptions, and drive system-level outcomes. In essence, they act as autonomous execution engines.

Achieving that level of deployment demands close collaboration among AI builders (be they internal teams or third-party vendors, as we discuss below), process owners, IT leaders, and experienced advisers. It often requires upfront and ongoing investment in infrastructure, integration, and change enablement. It’s challenging, but the payoff is significant—namely, full automation of high-value work traditionally performed by humans, driving end-to-end execution with greater speed, accuracy, and consistency than people alone can achieve.

It's in the move to quadrant 4 that the AI Deployment Matrix is particularly helpful because it ensures that you are investing in the AI tools and capabilities that map to your long-term strategy. Quadrant 4 represents a major shift from scattered point solutions to the foundation of a new operating model that redefines how work gets done and how value is created.

What the AI Deployment Matrix is—and isn’t

AI tools alone won’t transform the organization. Leaders must assess whether the tools they’re deploying simply improve efficiency or fundamentally reshape how the company operates. Therefore, it’s important to note that the AI Deployment Matrix is not a product taxonomy but rather a way to describe the capabilities of a particular deployment—for instance, who is empowered, how deeply, and to enable which outcomes. It helps leaders connect the dots between AI deployments and strategic ambition.

Given the rapid pace of AI advancement, it’s likely that many AI deployments will shift to the lower right of the AI Deployment Matrix, becoming more deeply integrated and making a greater strategic impact as users and technology vendors alike set their sights on quadrant 4. We see signs of this already as many chatbot vendors now offer data connectors that integrate with corporate databases and document repositories that are powered by no-code, customizable assistants with workflow and action capabilities. Similarly, CRM and foundation model providers now send engineers to tailor their software to a client’s needs, sometimes writing bespoke application code to address specific pain points.

What agentic AI is—and isn’t

There is enormous buzz around AI agents—and for good reason: They promise major advances in productivity, autonomy, and scale. As such, it’s reasonable to ask whether the deployment of an AI agent qualifies you as being in quadrant 4.

Not necessarily. Agents don’t guarantee transformation. In fact, depending on the agent in question, it could qualify as a quadrant 1, 2, 3, or 4 deployment. There is a considerable spread, for example, between an agentic research assistant that helps an individual employee gather information, synthesize findings, and generate insights (quadrant 1) vs. an agent that’s deeply integrated across systems, orchestrating/executing end-to-end workflows and autonomously driving business outcomes (undeniably quadrant 4). Many agents fall somewhere in between.

The AI Deployment Matrix helps you cut through the hype and understand where any “next big thing”—be it agents, copilots, or autonomous enterprises—fits with your strategy so that you don’t blindly chase trends but remain focused on your transformation goals.

How the AI Deployment Matrix serves AI product companies

As valuable as the AI Deployment Matrix is in helping enterprise leaders make critical deployment decisions, it’s equally useful for AI product companies as they clarify product strategy, sharpen positioning, and better serve customers. It provides a strategic lens for product design, differentiation, and go-to-market (GTM) execution, helping product companies stand out in a market flooded with tools, buzzwords, and hype.

The AI Deployment Matrix enables vendors to anchor customer conversations and differentiate between tactical utility and strategic impact. Are you empowering individual users (quadrant 1)? Amplifying human intelligence with personalized, context-aware support (quadrant 2)? Leveraging embedded AI within enterprise software (quadrant 3)? Or delivering transformational capabilities that require workflow reinvention (quadrant 4)?

Understanding your current quadrant and your trajectory across the AI Deployment Matrix can help guide product roadmap decisions and support more targeted customer discovery. Each quadrant implies different levels of integration complexity, deployment support, and customer expectations. This directly impacts your:

• Engineering resourcing (e.g., building connectors vs. delivering bespoke solutions)
• GTM strategy (e.g., product-led vs. sales-led motion)
• Customer readiness (e.g., IT integration capability, change management appetite)
• Support model (e.g., self-serve vs. high-touch deployment)

The AI Deployment Matrix helps you make deliberate trade-offs about how far to push customization, where to invest in professional services, and when to offer modular vs. deeply embedded solutions.

Finally, using the AI Deployment Matrix in your sales and implementation process builds trust and credibility. It allows you to clarify what kind of value customers can expect (and on what timeline), educate buyers on the difference between point solutions and transformation, and prepare customers for the executive sponsorship and organizational change management required as they move deeper into the AI Deployment Matrix.

When customers understand which quadrant your product fits into and what it takes to move toward more transformative use cases, you lay the foundation for better adoption, better retention, and better outcomes.

Governance: The flip side of clarity

The AI Deployment Matrix not only clarifies the types of AI technologies you’re deploying and how they advance your ambition, it also helps you determine how to govern such efforts. A one-size-fits-all approach is not viable because each quadrant has a unique set of risks and responsibilities. Effective governance ensures that the productivity gains you achieve through AI don’t come at the expense of trust, safety, or control. Governance doesn’t impede your AI efforts; it allows you to scale them responsibly. As you progress from quadrant 1 to quadrant 4, your governance will need to evolve accordingly (see Figure 2).

Accelerating your AI journey

AI transformation doesn’t begin with technology but with clarity. That’s why we designed the AI Deployment Matrix to be more than a just a framework; it’s a strategic lens that enables you to peer past the hype, assess where you are today and map where you need to go. Quadrants 1, 2, and 3 deliver important value, but transformation lives in quadrant 4. That’s where AI reshapes how work gets done, how decisions are made, and how value is created.

We can help. Beginning with a detailed diagnostic, we’ll assess your current position within the AI Deployment Matrix and show you how to chart an AI strategy built on use cases that link directly to concrete, transformative outcomes. We’ll guide you through the buy/build/partner decisions as you extend your deployments across the quadrants. We can also develop bespoke solutions with our industry-leading data science and AI engineering team, and help you build the same capability internally. And we’ll make sure your teams have the capabilities they need to reach Quadrant 4, with help from our world-class mobilization, change management, AI education, and process redesign experts.

Getting there takes intentionality. As you evolve point solutions into integrated systems, moving from isolated tools to coordinated workflows and from incremental improvements to fundamental redesign, your AI transformation will take hold. The AI Deployment Matrix is foundational to this journey. Once you understand where AI sits in your company today, you can determine what it becomes tomorrow. Simply a utility, or a true competitive edge? Scattered initiatives, or an enterprise transformation? Now you don’t have to guess.