## Blogs on IT Support and Cybersecurity for Small Business Insights on cybersecurity, AI, and IT strategy to help business leaders reduce risk, improve performance, and make better technology decisions. [ Categories ](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/categories "Categories") [ Tags ](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/tags "Tags") [ Categories: All Categories ](https://colemantechnologies.com/javascript:void(0); "Categories") Search...Suggested keywords [ x ](https://colemantechnologies.com/javascript:void(0);) # Strategy Before Software: What a Week in Texas Confirmed About AI [Coleman Technologies Blog](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/categories/blog) [News and Events](https://colemantechnologies.com/news-a-events) [Coleman Technologies Admin](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/blogger/darren-coleman) Friday, 21 August 2026 [ ![1787696346989](//colemantechnologies.com/images/easyblog_articles/2188/b2ap3_large_1787696346989.jpeg) ](//colemantechnologies.com/images/easyblog_articles/2188/1787696346989.jpeg "1787696346989") ## Strategy Before Software: What a Week in Texas Confirmed About AI AI Strategy & Leadership VISION 26 · Dallas | AI Profit Con · Austin At the end of August, I spent a week in Texas attending two very different conferences back to back. VISION 26 in Dallas brought together IT and cybersecurity providers from across North America, including a keynote from former White House CIO Theresa Payton. AI Profit Con in Austin brought together entrepreneurs, advisors, and business leaders focused on where AI is actually creating value. Different audiences. Different conversations. But I came home from both with the same conclusion. **Businesses do not need more AI tools. They need a strategy for using them.** I went to Texas for a reason. Our clients are being sold AI from every direction right now, and part of my job is to sit in those rooms, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and bring back what actually matters. Here is what I brought home. ### The Story That Stuck With Me At the Austin event, a speaker brought a business owner up from the audience. He runs a successful tax firm with roughly 30 employees and eight figures in revenue. He had spent the past year building his own AI environment because he could see where the technology was going and the advantage it could create. There was one problem. When he asked his IT provider for help, they had nothing for him. No guidance. No guardrails. No plan. So he built it himself, inside a business responsible for highly sensitive financial information. His biggest concern was not falling behind on AI. It was rolling AI out to his employees without clear rules for what information could be shared, which tools could be trusted, or where human oversight was still required. That story stayed with me because it illustrates a gap I believe our industry needs to address. **Business owners are already adopting AI. Their technology partners need to be ready to help them do it responsibly.** AI cannot simply become another application that gets installed and forgotten. ### AI Is Already Entering Your Business One thing became very clear across both conferences: businesses will not always decide when AI arrives. AI capabilities are increasingly being built into the software companies already depend on. Accounting platforms, practice management systems, Microsoft 365, CRM platforms, field service applications, and countless other business tools are adding AI features. At the same time, employees are adopting their own tools. That means the question for business leaders is quickly changing. It is no longer: **“Should we allow AI?”** It is: **“How is AI already being used in our organization, and are we managing it appropriately?”** There is a significant difference between those two questions. ### Buying AI Is Not an AI Strategy Another theme came through repeatedly in Texas: buying technology does not automatically create business value. Companies can spend heavily on AI and still have very little to show for it when they start with the product instead of the problem. That is backwards. Before evaluating an AI platform, businesses should be able to answer some basic questions: - What problem are we trying to solve? - What does success look like? - What information will the system have access to? - What could go wrong? - Where does a person still need to review the output? - How will we know whether the investment actually worked? Those questions are less exciting than watching an AI demo. They are also far more important. **Companies rarely struggle because they picked the wrong tool. They struggle because they picked a tool before they picked an outcome.** ### Three Things I Would Do This Fall If you lead a professional services firm or another organization handling sensitive client information, I would start with three things. #### 1. Ask Your Team How They Are Already Using AI Do not start with a software inventory. Ask your employees: **“How are you using AI in your work today?”** You may discover people using AI to summarize meetings, draft emails, research prospects, analyze documents, write proposals, troubleshoot problems, or work with client information. You need to understand the behaviour before you can govern it. #### 2. Put the Guardrails in Writing Your employees need to know what is acceptable. Which AI tools are approved? Can client information be entered? What about financial information, contracts, intellectual property, or employee data? When does an AI-generated answer need to be reviewed by a person? A practical AI acceptable use policy does not need to prevent experimentation. Done properly, it creates the boundaries that allow employees to experiment more safely. #### 3. Start With One Business Problem Do not begin by asking: **“What can we do with AI?”** Start with: **“Where are we losing time, creating unnecessary risk, or doing repetitive work that could be improved?”** Pick one problem. Establish a baseline. Determine what a better outcome looks like. Then evaluate whether AI is the right tool. That order matters. ### What You Can Safely Ignore You can ignore the AI tool of the week. The market is moving too quickly to build a long-term strategy around whichever product happens to be getting attention today. A business with good governance, clear objectives, and secure technology foundations can evaluate and adopt better tools as they emerge. A business with dozens of disconnected AI subscriptions and no strategy cannot buy its way out of that problem. You can also ignore the pressure to move fast simply because everyone else appears to be moving fast. There is a difference between moving slowly and moving deliberately. **Moving deliberately with guardrails in place will beat moving quickly without them.** Years ago, I contributed the book *Easy Prey: How to Protect Your Business from Data Breach, Cybercrime and Employee Fraud*. My focus was why small businesses become attractive targets when basic protections are overlooked. AI has not changed that lesson. **It has raised the stakes.** ### Where Coleman Technologies Fits Coleman Technologies is not trying to become an AI software company. That is not our role. Our role is to help businesses understand where AI can create real value, determine how it fits within their existing technology environment, protect the information entrusted to them, establish appropriate governance, and implement the technology responsibly. That means sometimes recommending AI. It also means being willing to say when a new AI product does not solve a problem worth solving. After a week of conversations in Dallas and Austin, I came home more convinced of the order than ever: **Understand the problem. Protect the trust your clients place in you. Establish the guardrails. Then choose the technology.** **Strategy before software.** If you are wondering where your own organization stands, start with one question: **How is your team using AI in your business today?** The answers will tell you where to start. ### About Darren Coleman Darren Coleman is Founder and CEO of Coleman Technologies, a Langley-based managed IT, cybersecurity, and AI strategy firm serving organizations across Greater Vancouver. With more than 25 years in technology and security, he works with business leaders on cybersecurity, technology strategy, operational resilience, and responsible AI adoption. [ ](https://colemantechnologies.com/javascript:void(0);) [ ](https://colemantechnologies.com/javascript:void(0);) [ ](https://colemantechnologies.com/javascript:void(0);) [×](https://colemantechnologies.com/javascript:void(0);) Stay Informed When you subscribe to the blog, we will send you an e-mail when there are new updates on the site so you wouldn't miss them. Your Name E-mail Address [ Password Hygiene Doesn’t Have to Be a Nightmare… T... ](https://colemantechnologies.com/newsletter-content/password-hygiene-doesn-t-have-to-be-a-nightmare-the-right-tools-make-it-easy) [ What to Look for When Choosing a Proactive IT Supp... ](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/what-to-look-for-when-choosing-a-proactive-it-support-partner) About the author [ ![Coleman Technologies Admin](https://colemantechnologies.com/media/com_easyblog/images/avatars/author.png) ](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/blogger/darren-coleman) [Coleman Technologies Admin](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/blogger/darren-coleman) [ ](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/blogger/darren-coleman) Author's recent posts [More posts from author](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/blogger/darren-coleman) [ Monday, 31 August 2026 FV+AI Launches as Fraser Valley Chapter of the BC+AI Community ](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/fvai-fraser-valley-bc-ai-community) [ Tuesday, 05 May 2026 Darren Coleman Featured in Boss Today on AI Literacy and Human Judgment ](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/darren-coleman-bosstoday-ai-literacy) [ Monday, 06 April 2026 How Cloud IT Services Are Transforming Business Continuity ](https://colemantechnologies.com/blog/how-cloud-it-services-are-transforming-business-continuity)