Corporate Lunch · No. 003
Your Company Bought Everyone AI. Nobody Opened It.
Subject: Nobody Opened It, The Copilot You Already Have… Plus Dave Logs In Once
Your Company Bought Everyone AI. Nobody Opened It.
Somewhere in your company there is a spreadsheet with a number on it. The number is how many AI licenses were purchased. Next to it, in a column nobody screenshots for the board deck, is how many have been opened.
The gap between those two numbers is the entire story of enterprise AI in 2026.
Here is how it happened, and it happened almost the same way everywhere. An executive read something. A competitor announced something. A vendor offered enterprise pricing with a deadline attached. Procurement moved with a speed that shocked everyone who has ever tried to get a monitor. And then, on a Tuesday, nine thousand people received an email with the subject line “Exciting news about our AI journey.”
The email contained a link, a value proposition, and no instructions. It did not say what you should use it for. It did not say what you are allowed to paste into it. It did not say whether the thing you were already doing with it, quietly, on your personal account, was now sanctioned or now a fireable offense.
So the licenses sat there. And the rollout entered its second phase, which is the enablement phase, which means somebody made a deck.
The deck had a slide titled “Use Cases.” The use cases were: summarize documents, draft emails, brainstorm. These are the use cases in every deck. They are the use cases because they are the ones that are true of the tool in general and therefore true of nobody’s job in particular. Nobody has ever finished a workday and thought, I wish I had brainstormed harder.
Phase three is measurement. Someone is now accountable for an adoption number. Because logins are the only thing that can be counted by Friday, logins become the goal. Your manager will forward you a note asking you to log in. You will log in. The number will go up. The work will not change.
None of this means the tool is bad. That’s the part that gets lost. The tool is, in several narrow and specific ways, genuinely useful — and the rollout has been designed in a way that makes it almost impossible to discover which ways those are. You were given a solution and asked to go find the problem, on your own time, without being told what’s allowed.
So let’s do the part they skipped.
How to actually use the AI your company already bought
Written for people who cannot install software, cannot expense a subscription, and cannot paste customer data into a browser tab. That is most people, and almost nobody writes for them.
Find out what you already have.
Before you request anything, open your SSO tile drawer — the app grid nobody scrolls. Most large companies are already paying for something: Copilot inside M365, Gemini inside Workspace, an assistant bolted into ServiceNow, Salesforce, or your ticketing system. It is usually sitting in the toolbar of an app you use daily. Requesting a tool you already have costs you six weeks and a small amount of credibility.
Find the actual data rule, in writing, before you need it.
This is the step everyone skips and it’s the one that matters. You are looking for your data classification policy — the document that defines your tiers, usually something like public, internal, confidential, restricted. Find where approved AI tools are mapped to those tiers.
Ask your manager or your infosec partner one specific question, in writing: which classification levels are approved for input into the tool, and where is that documented? You want the answer in email. Not because anyone’s out to get you, but because a written answer converts a risk you’re carrying personally into a decision the company has made.
Rules of thumb while you wait: a sanctioned enterprise tenant is different from the public consumer version of the same product, and the difference is usually where your data goes. Customer names, employee records, unreleased financials, and anything under a contract with a confidentiality clause stay out until someone tells you otherwise in writing.
Three flows worth the effort.
Transcript to decision log. Your meeting tool already produces a transcript. Summaries are useless because everyone gets one and nobody reads it. Instead ask for: decisions made, owner for each, open questions with no owner, and anything stated as a commitment with a date. That last category is the one that saves you. Send it within the hour, while people still remember agreeing.
Thread to one-pager. Take a decision that’s been rotting in email for three weeks and ask for it back as: the decision required, the options, what each one costs, and what happens if nobody chooses. You are not asking the tool to decide. You are converting sprawl into something a busy person can respond to with a yes.
Requirements gap check. Before a doc goes to a team, ask what a person building this would need to know that isn’t written down. It’s a mediocre writer and a genuinely good reviewer. This is the flow that has saved me the most rework.
Skip the permission you don’t need.
Everything above happens inside tools your company has already licensed and approved. No install request, no procurement ticket, no expense report. The reason most people never get to step three is that they stall at a permission gate they invented.
One honest caveat: Every one of these produces a draft, not an artifact. The value is that it moves you from a blank page to an edit. If you send the output unread, you will eventually send something wrong to someone senior, and you will have earned it.
The Corporate Translator
Dave & His Manager: The Adoption Number
Inbox advantage: subscribers get the script before it’s filmed.
Dave, you’ve been given an AI license.
Okay. For what?
For AI.
Right, but for what part of my job?
That’s what’s exciting. It’s up to you.
So there’s no specific —
There’s a deck. I’ll send you the deck. The deck has use cases.
What are the use cases?
Summarizing, drafting, and brainstorming.
Those are the three things the tool does.
And now you’re doing them.
Can I put our customer data in it?
…I’ll find out.
So what should I do this week?
Log in.
And then?
Nothing. Just log in. Adoption is measured Friday.
The Thing You Make Sunday So Thursday Doesn’t Beat You
Sesame chicken and rice bowls. Four servings, about 35 minutes, and it survives a Thursday microwave without becoming a war crime — which is a real constraint most recipes ignore.
Requisition
- 1.5 lb chicken thighs, boneless
- 2 cups jasmine rice
- 3 tbsp soy sauce
- 1 tbsp sesame oil
- 2 tbsp honey
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1 tbsp fresh ginger
- 1 large head broccoli
- Rice vinegar, sesame seeds, scallions
Procedure
- Rice on. Ignore it.
- Thighs into 1-inch pieces, not breast — breast turns to cardboard on day three, thighs don’t. This is the entire reason the recipe works.
- Soy, sesame oil, honey, garlic, ginger in a jar. Shake.
- Chicken in a hot pan, hard sear, don’t crowd it. Sauce in for the last two minutes.
- Broccoli roasted, not steamed. Steamed broccoli reheats into a smell your coworkers will remember.
- Four containers. Rice, chicken, broccoli, separated. Splash of rice vinegar before it goes in the fridge.
Notes: Holds four days. Add the sesame seeds and scallions at the desk, not on Sunday, or they go soft.
“We’re not behind on AI. We’re being deliberate.”
Fig. 1 — Quarterly all-hands, Q&A portion. Speaker identified. Name withheld.
Per My Last Email
Something happened at your job that would sound made up if you described it at a party. Send it. Names are removed before anything is published.
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