Many companies are talking about AI strategy. But what they really mean is applying AI to the edges of their existing structure. A pilot here. A Copilot there. A “layer” on top of what’s already been built.
And while that’s understandable, it misses the point.
The real opportunity in AI is not just to enhance existing processes—it’s to question their relevance altogether. If your reporting chain is based on human escalation, what does it mean when decisions can be made—reliably—by an autonomous system? If approvals take five steps today, is the goal really to make each step faster… or to eliminate them entirely?
What I’m learning is that AI doesn’t gently improve—it often reshapes. But that reshaping only happens when organisations are ready to reframe the problem, not just automate the workflow.
This requires more than tech. It requires trust—especially at the management level. And that trust takes time to build, because AI systems don’t behave like humans. They behave like something… else.
So the real question isn’t “What’s our AI strategy?”
It’s: “Are we willing to change the assumptions it threatens to expose?”
Because otherwise, we’re just adding new tools to old thinking.
