We’ve reviewed a lot of “AI strategies” over the last two years. The majority describe what the organisation will buy, when, and from whom. Some include a slide on governance. Almost none describe what the organisation will be capable of doing differently as a result.
A procurement plan is not a strategy. The strategic question is which capabilities you want to own, which you’re willing to rent, and which you’re going to deliberately not develop. The answers should be different for a bank, a publisher and a logistics company — and yet the documents are eerily similar. That’s the tell.
A real AI strategy starts from the work, not the technology. What decisions are made in your organisation today that are slow, expensive, or systematically wrong? Which of those decisions are now tractable in a way they weren’t two years ago? That’s the strategy. The vendor list is an appendix.
If your AI roadmap could be lifted wholesale and dropped into a competitor’s deck without anyone noticing, it isn’t a roadmap. It’s a market summary.
Alex
