Knowing Your Level

I've started asking a question I didn't used to ask, which is: how do you know what level you're actually at?

Most founders will say Level 2 or 3. Active or Governed. Teams using AI, agreed use cases, some workflows rebuilt. That progress is real. But then I'll ask whether they have a written AI policy their legal team has reviewed, whether they know which client contracts cover AI use in deliverables, whether they can say with confidence which data goes to which tools and under what terms. And the answer is usually somewhere between not sure and not yet.

That's the gap between Level 2 and Level 3. It isn't a gap in tools or even ambition. It's that nobody's treated AI governance as a structural decision in the same way they'd treat a significant hire or a major new client relationship.

I was in Boston recently and this came up in almost every conversation I had. Founders doing real work on AI, seeing real results, but who hadn't yet made the decisions that let you move fast without creating exposure you can't see. Several said it was the most useful reframe they'd had on the subject.

The full model is at scaleatspeed.com/ai if you want to look through it.