Follow the AI for Business Leaders learning path on AI Builders Network - a free, structured roadmap with curated resources and step-by-step progress tracking.
This path is for executives, directors, and team leads who must make AI investment, vendor, and policy decisions, and who refuse to do it on buzzwords. It builds real technical literacy and ends with a concrete roadmap, without requiring a single line of code.
By the end you'll be able to: Evaluate AI vendor claims with sharp, informed questions; Select high-ROI AI use cases using a feasibility framework; Make build-vs-buy-vs-API decisions with a clear rubric; Draft an AI usage policy grounded in NIST and EU AI Act basics; Write a two-quarter AI roadmap with hiring implications.
You need literacy, not engineering. Leaders who understand what models can reliably do, why they hallucinate, and what evaluation evidence looks like make dramatically better vendor and investment decisions. Studies consistently show most enterprise AI pilots fail at deployment: usually traceable to leadership-level scoping mistakes.
Picking use cases with zero error tolerance first. AI is probabilistic: a use case that breaks on a 5% error rate, like unsupervised customer commitments, will fail, while triage, drafting, and summarization absorb errors gracefully. Start where a human reviews output and value scales with volume.
Default to buying for commodity needs and composing APIs for differentiating workflows. Building custom models is rarely justified: frontier APIs outperform most self-built models at a fraction of the cost. The build-vs-buy step in this path gives you a one-page rubric covering data privacy, switching costs, and evaluation evidence.