SoT AI is our internal initiative to become AI-native.

If AI is powerful enough to reshape our clients’ businesses, it can reshape ours as well.

We are not observers of AI. We are practitioners. We care deeply about how AI actually behaves inside real operating environments where deadlines, budgets, governance, and accountability exist. We want to understand not just what AI can do in theory, but how it performs when it becomes part of a disciplined operating system.

SoT AI is our founder-led initiative to institutionalize AI inside Strategy of Things. Not as a side experiment. Not as a marketing story. But as an operating function embedded into how we think, work, decide, and deliver.

We are becoming AI-native because it helps us to serve our clients better. And we are doing it because we genuinely believe in this technology and want to understand its full, responsible potential.

AI does not operate in isolation. It affects infrastructure, data architecture, model governance, workflows, risk oversight, and executive decision-making. When any of those dimensions are unmanaged, the outcomes and value provided by AI is diminished.

For this reason, we've developed a 9-layer operating model that spans a number of technical, operations, and management domains. We believe every organization using artificial intelligence needs an AI operating model. Inside our own firm, we apply our AI Operating Model to our company AI initiatives. That includes:

• Secure Knowledge Systems: We designed, built and operate a secure internal knowledge base and interactive agent trained on our research, frameworks, methodologies, and institutional knowledge. This improves analytical precision, preserves institutional memory, and strengthens advisory rigor.
• Research & Intelligence Automation: We continuously monitor fast changing developments in AI tools, regulatory shifts, practitioner insights, and emerging architectural patterns. That intelligence is evaluated, structured, and integrated into our work so we are always up to date.
• AI-Integrated Workflows: We are redesigning our internal processes and operations to embed AI responsibly into planning, analysis, delivery, and communication. This allows us to "do more with less", and to do it more responsively, accurately, and effectively.
• Executive Oversight and Governance: We are designing and are implementing a governance structure to guide and manage AI usage inside our firm. This helps us use AI responsibly, mitigate risk and create relevant business impact. We track our performance and impact the same way we advise our clients to do.

We do not recommend practices we are unwilling to live under ourselves.

AI is evolving rapidly. We are genuinely curious about the frontier of AI, particularly agentic systems, orchestration frameworks, and emerging operating architectures.

But we want to explore with a purpose. We created the SoT AI Innovation Lab so we can evaluate emerging technologies under real operating constraints. We examine not only what they can do, but where they fail, where governance becomes essential, and where infrastructure realities limit performance.

OpenClaw is one such technology we are actively exploring. OpenClaw is an emerging agentic AI framework designed to coordinate multiple AI agents to perform structured tasks and workflows. We evaluate it to understand how agent-based systems might operate reliably under enterprise governance, not just in demos, but inside disciplined operating sandbox environments. The outcomes from OpenClaw may be small pilots on select parts of our business processes and deep insights we provide to our clients.

Many emerging  and innovative AI technologies look compelling in demonstration. Far fewer perform reliably inside governed operating environments. Our lab exists to understand that difference.

Because we operate AI inside our own governed operating model, we confront the same realities our clients face:

• Adoption resistance
• Infrastructure readiness gaps
• Data limitations
• Model reliability tradeoffs
• Capital prioritization decisions
• Cross-functional coordination challenges

We do not advise from the sidelines. We institutionalize AI in our business. We bring knowledge and insights gained from doing AI. We bring that lived experience to every fractional Chief AI Officer engagement we undertake.

AI is not simply a technology initiative. It is an operating transformation. SoT AI ensures we guide that transformation with rigor, practical experience, and accountability.