Decidr

The recent boom in executive-level AI education, as reported by the AFR, reflects a growing urgency in corporate Australia to make sense of artificial intelligence. Boardrooms are alive with talk of machine learning, large language models and AI-powered transformation. Institutions from Harvard to Melbourne Business School and consultancies like McKinsey and Accenture, are responding with a wave of courses promising to bring senior leaders up to speed.

On the surface, this sounds like progress. But beneath the enthusiasm lies a quiet disconnect: a growing gulf between learning about AI and actually leveraging it. While courses are designed to spark awareness, most organisations don’t have an awareness problem. They have an execution problem. And this is where the education wave, however well-intentioned, risks falling short.

AI transformation may begin as a knowledge gap, but in practical terms, it becomes a strategy problem. Awareness alone does not change how a business operates. No amount of theoretical fluency will clean up fragmented data systems, unify siloed teams or build cross-functional momentum. Courses can’t calculate ROI or guide an organisation through the real-world complexities of implementation. They are, at best, the start of the journey. For AI to create business value, knowledge must convert into alignment. Curiosity must harden into conviction.

That’s what a roadmap is for.

It’s not about turning executives into technologists, it’s about identifying where AI can generate value, how to structure the organisation to capture that value, and (crucially) where to begin. At Decidr, we define the roadmap as a focused, four-week process that interrogates a company’s commercial priorities, data readiness, operational challenges, and internal capabilities. The result is a clear, executable plan that links AI investment to business outcomes and provides leaders with the confidence to move from intent to impact.

Across sectors and company sizes, from $15 million startups to $2.5 billion enterprises, we’ve seen the same pattern emerge i.e. a hunger to “do something” with AI… and that’s about it. The AI roadmap fills that void. It is the point at which theoretical ambition gives way to practical architecture in a shift from pondering to planning.

This transition sits within a broader maturity curve that most businesses follow. First comes curiosity, the early flickers of interest in AI’s potential. Then education, where executives begin to make sense of the tools and terminology. This often leads to sporadic experimentation with pilots and proofs of concept that rarely scale. It is only when a company reaches the stage of strategic alignment that it becomes capable of deploying AI with purpose. The roadmap exists at this inflection point. It is the hinge that moves an organisation from chaos to clarity.

What’s often missed in this conversation is the distinction between personal and organisational value. Education serves the individual. It sharpens minds, expands perspectives and adds a line to the LinkedIn profile. But the roadmap serves the organisation. It aligns functions, galvanises teams, reveals structural bottlenecks and highlights commercial opportunities. Most importantly, it builds consensus around what to do next and why.

None of this is to diminish the value of executive learning. In fact, the roadmap depends on a certain level of fluency at the top. But fluency without strategy is a dead end. Worse, it can create a false sense of progress. A belief that something is happening simply because something has been learned.

To that end, the future of AI in business will not be determined by how many people understand the technology. It will be shaped by how many businesses learn to use it. Not just in one function, but across the entire organisation.

So the next time an AI course lands in your inbox, ask a harder question. Will this change how we work? Will it bring us closer to impact? Or is it simply another stamp of awareness, mistaken for action?

Because while awareness may be where the journey begins, it is not where value is realised. That requires something more deliberate. Something more actionable.

That requires a roadmap.