---
title: "Stage 1 — Discover AI: Establish the Foundations"
description: "Prepare for AI adoption by documenting tasks, workflows and costs, setting basic policies, and identifying opportunities aligned with organizational goals."
url: "https://www.capbera.com/stage1-discover-ai"
published: "2026-10-27T17:37:52Z"
authors: ["Lorelei Cheung"]
categories: ["Strategy & Performance"]
tags: ["AI Readiness","AI Maturity Model"]
---

# Stage 1 — Discover AI: Establish the Foundations

Understand your organization's work before deciding where AI belongs. The focus of this stage is to identify promising opportunities where AI might add value.

![photo rocks stacked from smallest to largest showing organization](https://www.capbera.com/assets/uploads/daa248137080f70e5f56c232f0a7b723.png)

# Your Result

At ***Stage 1: Discover AI***, you're excited about what AI can do for your organization but you're unsure how it can help. You've seen large corporations rush into adopting AI, only to incur significant costs when the technology fails to deliver on its promise.

This often happens when organizations adopt AI before understanding the work they're trying to improve and what that work actually costs.

Adopting AI within your organization acts as a force multiplier - it can make well-performing tasks, processes, and projects even better but it can also weaken or break poorly designed ones.

At Capbera, we want your organization to succeed with AI. We believe that taking the time to catalogue, organize, and assess your work creates a stronger foundation for adoption—and puts your organization in a better position to earn a return on its AI investment.

# What to Avoid

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is introducing AI into their operations before understanding how their work gets done. Without that understanding, they risk investing in tools that don't solve the right problems, automating inefficient processes, or creating new costs without meaningful benefits.

The groundwork in this stage is essential. Take the time to understand what work is done, who is responsible for it, what outcomes are expected, and what it costs. This will put your organization in a stronger position to identify where AI can augment your work—and where it may not be the right solution.

# Focus Areas

| **Activity** | **Why It Matters** |
| --- | --- |
| **Define tasks and their desired outcomes** | Establishes what the work is supposed to achieve before considering whether AI can help. |
| **Define tasks and their desired outcomes** | Establishes what the work is supposed to achieve before considering whether AI can help. |
| **Document processes** | Makes existing workflows visible so you can identify where AI might be useful and where process problems need to be addressed first. |
| **Map tasks to strategic objectives** | Prioritizes opportunities based on organizational value rather than experimenting with AI simply because it is available. |
| **Understand task and project costs** | Establishes a baseline for evaluating whether AI could save enough time or money to justify its costs. |
| **Standardize styles, formats, and instructions** | Creates consistent expectations for work products and provides a foundation for guiding AI and evaluating its output. |
| **Communicate organizational priorities** | Identifies AI opportunities that support shared goals rather than isolated individual interests. |
| **Establish basic AI-use policies** | Sets boundaries for safe exploration before AI becomes involved in more sensitive work. |
| **Ensure basic data backup and recovery** | Provides a basic resilience measure to protect organizational information. |
| **Assess readiness to invest time and money** | Establishes whether the organization has the capacity to move beyond curiosity into meaningful experimentation. |

# Progressing to Stage 2: Explore AI

Before moving to ***Stage 2: Explore AI*,** your organization should have:

- **A documented understanding of its work:** A list of key tasks or processes, their intended outcomes, and their approximate costs.
- **Consistent work standards:** Standardized styles, formats, and instructions that help define expectations for work products.
- **Basic AI-use policies:** Initial guidance on when AI may be used, what information it may access, and how its outputs should be reviewed.
- **Data backup and recovery:** Regular data backups and a reliable way to recover data if it is lost or accidentally deleted.
- **An initial adoption budget:** A preliminary estimate of the time, organizational support, and AI infrastructure needed to begin experimenting.

# What's Next?

At ***Stage 2: Explore AI**,* your organization will begin to:

- Experiment with chat-based AI (Generative AI) tools on selected tasks.
- Build confidence in using AI effectively.
- Identify practical opportunities to use AI to augment existing work.
- Learn where AI performs well, where it falls short, and which opportunities warrant further investigation.

**Ready to explore?** Learn more about [Stage 2: Explore AI](https://www.capbera.com/stage2-explore-ai).