Three types of companies through the AI lens

I suspect there are 3 types of companies through the lens of AI adoption.

#1 The AI trailblazers

Companies that are aiming to run their AI ecosystem in-house. Typically those companies already have strong technical skills on payroll. Those companies likely think “why would I buy a SaaS when I can claude code my own in two days.” If you have a strong technical bench you can likely succeed as the last mile on these tend to be most challenging, i.e. going from vibe coded prototype to production ready at scale. The cost to operate likely goes down. The opportunity cost tends to go up as revenue doesn’t come from your workforce focusing on building in-house tools with AI. So mixed AI ROI.

#2 The aspiring AI trailblazers

The second type of company has many “pockets” within the org that want to be an “AI trailblazer” but lacks the ability to finish, i.e. the last mile. They likely have a lot of half-baked prototypes running across people’s laptops. Cool demo but how do you effectively/safely roll the solution out across the company or to customers? They remain on traditional tools, ad hoc AI use by sending docs to LLM of choice and have a stack of half-baked AI prototypes. These tend to have the lowest AI ROI of the three.

#3 The hyper-focused specialists

The third company is hyper-focused on their core differentiators. They see AI as a tool and recognize that partnerships allow them to accelerate AI adoption while staying focused on their core differentiators. They have already benefited from outsourcing non-core systems to partners. They are cautiously weeding through the massive amount of noise from all the AI solutions hitting the market. They are expecting existing vendors to step up with AI solutions. They are curious and nervous about AI. They expect their partnership strategy to materialize big wins with AI, in time. These typically see the largest AI ROI with minimal opportunity costs from half-baked AI experiments. Especially if their AI partner is hyper-focused on results-based solutions.

Curious if any of these rings true. What type of company is yours?