Think like an ecologist, not an engineer.
A playbook for SME leaders: the different way to think about adopting and enabling AI, inspired by ecology and how to apply to your business.
Dr Chloe Sharp and Simon Sharp · Sharp Insights · Free to download
If you lead a business you will have noticed that AI is not behaving like previous software. It talks back, shapes its environment, and opens up ways of working we have not had before.
The shift this playbook offers is to treat your business as a living system, a forest with its own root structure, where you, your teams and the AI cohabit. We say AI Collaborator, not tool: something the organisation is in a relationship with, not something you have installed.
Ecology is our metaphor, but the environment impact is literal: the compute behind every AI Collaborator has a real and growing cost in energy, water and carbon. Use it with intention and waste less.
Four principles the playbook is based on
AI is not simply 'software'.
Software is one-way and programmed to do a job. An AI Collaborator interprets what you give it and feeds back, so different people get different results. Treat it like software and you think in a tech-led way, rather than considering the complexities of AI in your ecosystem.
You shape AI, AI shapes you.
A business that builds AI into how it works becomes something different. It can learn, build and iterate quicker, with shorter feedback loops, and AI can augment, automate and enable new ways of working.
AI can help or harm.
Each AI Collaborator forms a relationship with each person that can help, harm, or sit in between. Most leaders have never considered these relationships as a system, and some think 'AI means efficiency'.
Evolve organisational AI with intention.
Jobs are not just mapped processes or stacks of tasks. The model is cohabitation and co-evolution, not a simple substitution or replacement of tasks and people.
What you get from this playbook
Three levels of your business
Read your business as micro-habitat, ecosystem and boundary at once, each with its own focus for stewardship.
Steward, Forester, Cohabitant
Who does this work in your business, and why the Forester is so often the missing role at SME scale.
Seven ways AI behaves in your business
AI Collaborators can help or harm your business. The seven archetypes explain each type and how it can make an impact.
Four ways to put the framework into practice
Two for awareness, to build a picture of what is going on. Two for action, to show how to manage your AI Collaborators.
Where you are now
A self-assessment across the four practices, from Unaware to Stewarding. Most SMEs land between stages one and three.
Your next steps
A 90-day starting sequence, week one to month three, working through the four practices in order.
Most leaders see AI as tech. But it is more than that: it is something changing every element of how we work. It's something we are only just learning to live with.
AI Ecology Framework · Sharp Insights
Free to download.
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