The ongoing maturing of the era of digital transformation is beingsuperseded by a new wave of AI transformation. Today’s rapidemergence of AI for R&D opens up a myriad of use cases across allsectors. Every company, organization, or individual in any field standsto gain the benefits of AI, in general, and, with the right level of projectplanning, can deliver high business performance improvement.Every day's media news seems to carry another story ofunprecedented successes, pretty much equally matched by otherarticles of concern over threats of unintended consequences. So it hasbeen for every new stage and level of the very human continuousstriving to make better tools to make a better life and to protect usfrom the bad things.In this short paper, we suggest that in these still early days of artificialintelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities, bothquestions are worthy of addressing: How do we build better tools tolive better lives, and how do we use our tools to prevent life’scatastrophes? In the modern world, the very best time to do that is inthe research and development (R&D) planning process by creatingframeworks that guide our innovative thinking and planning.