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A briefing for business owners

Cultivated AI

Grow, don't Chase.

We train business leaders to shape AI adoption in their teams, without depending on vendors who don't understand your business.

Just buying licenses for the AI tools that the vendors sold you will not lead to meaningful AI adoption. Your leadership team has to understand how to approach AI. Meanwhile the ground beneath your category is moving whether you act or not. Not just your competitors. Your suppliers and your customers are using AI to model you better than you can model them.

For example

Your customers are no longer searching for you. They are asking AI about you. Have you optimised your online presence for AIs to recommend you?

What Cultivated AI is

Cultivated AI is a 12-hour programme where your department heads and leadership team will learn to place AI in the context of their daily functions. Each leader walks away with a customised 90-day adoption plan that we help them design. They will be able to identify the week-long tasks that can be compressed to 30 minutes using the correct AI tools. Critically, they will learn to plan for the AI of tomorrow.

The discipline · why it works

The leaders winning learned to think clearly.

About AI, in the context of their own business. With principles that hold up as the tools change every quarter.

What to deploy.

What to ignore.

Where it fits.

Where it doesn't.

The four stages of Cultivated AI

Stage 1 Approach Fifteen principles for getting the most out of AI. The leader stops chasing tools and starts thinking clearly about them.
Stage 2 Distillation What's been between the leader's ears for years now runs as agentic AI playbooks. Their work, in their voice, at scale. The technical term is agentic skills.
Stage 3 Compounding The best playbooks move from one leader to the cohort, then to the rest of the company. Your best work stops being rare, and starts being the default.
Stage 4 Simulation Synthetic AI environments for strategy, preparation, and training. For the leader, and for the team. Things competitors cannot do at all.

An example

Meet Priya.

Priya is Head of Procurement at a mid-sized manufacturer, running a fifty-person team that owns vendor selection, contract negotiation, supplier risk, and category strategy.

Stage 1

Approach — how Priya now thinks.

Priya has internalised four principles she now uses on every AI question that lands on her desk. She stopped asking which tool to buy; she started asking how to think.

Plan for the AI of tomorrow
Ask AI to ask you the questions
Ask AI for help with AI
Cross-check answers with another AI

Stage 2

Distillation — her playbooks now run as AI.

What was in Priya's head for a decade now runs as agentic skills — in her voice, at her standard, on every file, every day. These are her first five.

Vendor Evaluation
Contract Clause Review
RFP Drafter
Negotiation Brief
Supplier Risk Scan

Stage 3

Compounding — she inherits her cohort's work.

Priya did not write these. Her peers did, in the same cohort. She runs them daily. Your best work stops being rare, and starts being the default.

Legal's contract-clause comparator
Finance's TCO modeller
HR's vendor-onboarding checklist

Stage 4

Simulation — she rehearses what hasn't happened yet.

Synthetic AI environments her competitors cannot build. For Priya, these are unlocks that simply weren't possible before.

Negotiation rehearsals against AI counterparties
Supply-chain shock scenarios
M&A diligence dry-runs
Crisis response drills
Onboarding simulations for new hires

Some case studies

When the leader sets a public standard.

Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund

NBIM

213,000 hrs

Saved per year. 600+ staff using Claude weekly.

"If you don't use it, you will never be promoted."

Nicolai Tangen, CEO, NBIM

$22B fintech · ~1,200 people

Ramp

99.5%

of employees are weekly AI users. ~30% of merged code changes from their internal coding agent.

"If you're not using Claude Code this year, no matter your role, you're underperforming."

Geoff Charles, CPO, Ramp

India's largest NBFC

Bajaj Finance

₹1,600 cr

Disbursed in a single quarter via AI voice agents on one workflow. ~1,500 agent roles redesigned. ~30% cost savings on the function.

A flagship workflow, run by AI, disclosed publicly on the earnings call.

Bajaj Finance · Q3 FY26 results

Why this matters for you

The world's most accountable institutional investor, one of its fastest-growing fintechs, and India's largest NBFC have made the same call. AI is non-negotiable, set publicly from the top. The Cultivated AI programme helps you build the equivalent for your business, on your terms.

Some failure modes

What can still go wrong.

Under-adoption

Microsoft Copilot

~5%

of enterprises that piloted Copilot have scaled it. Tens of millions of paid seats sit unused.

"Licensing is not adoption."

Gartner · 2025

Over-replacement

Klarna

May 2025

Replaced customer service with AI in 2024. By May 2025 the CEO publicly walked it back. Now hybrid.

"AI handles routine, humans handle empathy."

Klarna · revised position

Happening now · the same company from page 4

Bajaj Finance · Copilot

27,000 licenses

Committed to Microsoft Copilot, the same product that ~95% of enterprises piloted but did not scale.

Even India's largest NBFC can fall into the under-adoption pattern.

Cultivated AI assessment

Why this matters for you

The failure modes above are the default outcome when AI procurement happens before AI thinking. Stage 1 of the Cultivated AI programme exists precisely to ensure your leadership team approaches AI with the clarity to avoid both.

The engagement

Exactly what we'll do.

A 4-stage programme that clarifies your approach to AI.

Stage 1 Approach 15 core principles.

Stage 2 Distillation Encode your expertise.

Stage 3 Compounding Spread the best playbooks.

Stage 4 Simulation For strategy and training.

Every stage is workshopped in the context of your daily functions.

Format12-hour programme. Scheduled as per convenience.

CohortUp to fifteen leaders from the same company.

TakeawayEach leader leaves with a personalised 90-day AI adoption plan that puts all four stages to work.

Conducted by

Shalin Shodhan

20 years building tech pipelines for the world's best entertainment products, from Pixar movies to EA Games.

Shirish Andhare

20+ years of product leadership at Twitter, Uber, Razorpay. Senior Operating Partner at Glade Brook Capital.

Resilient pipelines are built by cultivating the approach, not chasing technology.