Călătoria AI – The AI Journey

It’s a business fable written from the perspective of someone who has spent years doing this work inside organizations, dealing with the decisions, the people, the technology, and the consequences when things don’t go as planned.

Over 36 months, we follow the leadership team of a Romanian company through 12 stages of AI maturity, from knowing next to nothing about AI (while being quite convinced they do) to running AI-native systems in production, with AI becoming part of the company’s DNA.

I wrote it from the inside, as a practitioner who has been in those meetings, challenged those assumptions, worked through the organizational friction, and seen firsthand what separates a promising AI initiative from one that actually delivers value. The situations, the language, the atmosphere in the room, the way people talk to each other, and, above all, the substance of the story come from my own professional experience.

Very little is made up. I’ve brought together real situations, conversations, decisions, mistakes, and lessons from years of working with AI in business. I’ve arranged them into a coherent 36-month journey, cut out as much unnecessary detail as I could, and, naturally, anonymized the people and companies involved.

It’s the kind of book I wish someone had handed me before I started making those mistakes myself.

Around 176 pages, written in Romanian. The story runs on the decisions, not on the technology: the pilot nobody wanted to stop, the board meeting where the numbers stopped meaning anything, the eight freed full-time equivalents and the question nobody wanted to put on the table.

What is inside

• Twelve phases, from a failed first proof of concept to a company that governs AI in production.
• Eight executives and an advisor – a CEO, a CFO, a CTO, an operations director, an HR director, legal, a data lead, and the person who was already inside.
• Threshold boxes between phases: what has to be true before you are allowed to move on.
• A toolkit section, deliberately kept apart from the story – the five-question filter, the one-page AI investment tableau, what to do on Monday morning, and a glossary.

Why a fable and not a framework book

Because the failures I have seen were never technical failures with a technical audience. They were meetings. Somebody said the wrong sentence with confidence, somebody else did not say the right one, and eighteen months later the money was gone. A framework does not reproduce that. A room does.

Where the book is, and what you can have now

The manuscript is finished and is with publishers. Until it is printed there is one thing I can do with it. I send your team one scene, the one closest to the decision you are facing, and only that scene. Then we spend ninety minutes together on a single question, which is where in your own company the same mistake is being made. You get a page on what came out of it. I do not charge for this and I do it once per company, in Romanian or, for an international board, from the English excerpt.

The sample memo on the Verdict page is written on AxClaim Group, the company in the book. The executive toolkit is available on request.