Integrate
A tool that sits outside your actual workflow is a demo. Integrate is the step that moves your AI build from something you have to remember to use into something that runs as a natural part of how your business operates. The distinction matters more than it sounds. Most AI tools that service business owners build get used twice, generate excitement, and then quietly disappear from the workflow because they weren't wired in.
Integration means connecting the tool to the systems where work happens — your CRM, your inbox, your project management tool, your client communication channels. It also means documentation: the SOP that tells your team when to use the tool, what inputs it needs, and what to do with the output. A tool nobody uses because they don't know how is not an asset. This step turns the build into infrastructure.
What This Step Covers
Integration is complete when your team uses the tool without being told to. Not because they found a workaround. Not because you reminded them. Because it is part of the process and ignoring it would feel like skipping a step. If the tool is still "optional," it hasn't been integrated — it's been made available. Those are not the same thing.
What Stage B Produces
By the end of Stage B, you have three things: a working understanding of how to communicate with AI systems, at least one real AI tool built and tested against your actual business, and that tool wired into your operations with an SOP your team follows. That is the Unlock output.
The businesses that complete Stage B report the same experience: they stopped thinking of AI as something to figure out and started thinking of it as a capability they have. That shift in identity is what Stage C builds on. You can't Scale what you haven't first made reliable. Stage B is what makes Stage C possible.
The free AI Readiness Assessment scores your current stage across the full framework in 3 minutes.