From Hype to Habit: An operating model for AI that lasts

“Is any of this actually working?”

Senior leaders often ask this quietly at the end of AI meetings, and most of them don’t get a straight answer. The tools have been bought and the pilots have launched. The technology works. Even so, the team has gone back to spreadsheets, the assistant runs but nobody reads what it produces, and the board has stopped asking how the AI programme is going.

From Hype to Habit gives a straight answer. Most AI fails quietly, and the cause is missing structure, not weak technology. Nobody owns the data. Too many pilots run at once. Assistants get launched into a muted Slack channel and are never reviewed again. The models are good enough. What most businesses lack is an operating system to keep them working.

The book calls that operating system FLAIR: Foundation, Leverage, Activation, Iteration, Realisation. It has five phases, run in order and repeated for every new initiative. Each phase is designed to stop one specific failure the authors saw waste budget and trust in years of client work.

Inside you’ll find:

• Why AI is failing quietly, and what the research really says once task-level gains are separated from firm-level results
• The FLAIR Scorecard, which tests whether your business is ready before you build anything
• The One-Page AI Plan, Use Case Prioritisation Matrix and ROI Calculator, for picking fewer initiatives and doing them properly
• The Assistant Brief and shadow-mode testing, to move assistants out of the demo and into real decisions
• Practical governance, a workforce playbook (Protect, Redesign, Prove) and a measurement scorecard that shows when time saved is being quietly absorbed elsewhere
• A ninety-day plan you can start on Monday

Every chapter follows Marlow Partners, a 400-person professional services firm with three AI assistants, two of them already abandoned. Seeing Marlow work through the framework, mistakes and all, shows what each phase looks like in practice.

This isn’t a trends survey, a vendor pitch or a technical manual, and it contains no code. It’s for the person who has stopped being excited about AI and started being responsible for it: the CIO who needs ROI before the next budget cycle, the commercial leader explaining why the sales assistant hasn’t moved the forecast, the transformation director whose reputation now depends on getting this right. It’s written for businesses of a hundred to a few thousand people.

Hype is everywhere. Habit is rare. This book is about building the habit.

About the authors

Richard Wood is the founder and CEO of Six & Flow, a growth consultancy operating across three continents that removes complexity, taking the problems that hold businesses back and using technology and process to simplify them. A business leader with an academic background in digital innovation, he has spent more than 20 years advising clients on growth and operations, working with marquee organisations across B2B and B2C to find the clearest path to sustained growth. Richard created the FLAIR framework because he believes AI only pays off once it becomes part of how people work every day.

Adam Aigbokhae is the director of strategy at Six & Flow, specialising in systems architecture, CRM infrastructure and operational transformation. With over a decade of experience, he designs and builds the connected data, processes and automation that enable organisations to operate and scale efficiently. His expertise spans enterprise architecture, systems integration and the development of practical business applications, with a particular focus on establishing the infrastructure required for effective, measurable and sustainable adoption.

Aimane Ben M Hand is one of the foremost thinkers on practical AI adoption in the Netherlands and the Benelux, helping boards and executive teams move beyond pilots to AI that changes how the business actually runs. That philosophy drives his work leading AI and Innovation at Six & Flow, where his implementations across sectors, from logistics to professional services, helped shape the FLAIR framework at the heart of this book.

Publisher - Grand Publishers

Language - English

Case Bound - PPC

Contributors

By author

Richard Wood

Adam Aigbokhae

Aimane Ben M Hand

Published Date - 2026-10-30

ISBN - 9781919083582

Dimensions - 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm

Page Count - 255