The AI Mandate

There is a mandate at a lot of organizations right now. Learn AI.

Great directive. Genuinely important. Absolutely necessary for anyone who wants to stay relevant in an environment that is moving faster than any formal curriculum can keep up with.

There is just one small problem. The training doesn't exist yet. The mandate is real. The roadmap to get there is not. Which means a lot of well intentioned professionals are sitting with a directive to learn something and no structured path to actually learn it.

So this week I did what operators do when the resource isn't available. I figured it out myself. I spent time this week going deep on Claude. Not surface level. Not the "here is how to write a better email" version. The actual capabilities. The depth. The ways an operator with the right questions and the right framework can build something that creates real measurable value inside a real operation. Shipping dashboards. Order flow visibility. Financial reporting models. Contract analysis. Scenario planning. Drafting communications that used to take an hour in twenty minutes. And I am still just getting started.

Here is what I want to say to every operations and supply chain professional who has heard the mandate but hasn't found the path yet. You don't need a formal program to begin. You need curiosity and a willingness to sit with something long enough to understand what it can actually do. The people who will have the most value in this industry over the next five years aren't the ones who waited for someone to teach them. They are the ones who taught themselves while everyone else was waiting.

The mandate is real. The training is self directed.