AI continues to consume all the oxygen in the room. We’ve gone from surprise to memes to denial with bouts of anger and sadness. And maybe just a touch of nihilism as we watch the multi-trillion dollar companies in this space maneuver, collapse entire consumer ecosystems, and appear to be rushing faster than any reasonable civic infrastructure can keep up. So badly, in fact, that recently a Microsoft executive said the quiet part out loud - losing social permission to deploy this technology could stop the progress altogether.
Many organizations rush to develop strategy, policy, and doctrine around how their organizations can and should use AI. Typically, the larger the organization the more complex the construct. In many cases, these efforts became out of date nearly as soon as they are published. And that's the real danger in trying to establish highly opinionated strategies while the environment is still uncertain.
The answer is developing a strategy that identifies risks, enables outcomes, and empowers the workforce. And develop fidelity as the environment evolves on an ongoing basis. Strategy disconnected from reality is simply fantasy.
This is why good strategy is so hard. Anyone can do strategy. Anyone can pick up a crystal ball and predict the future. It takes skill to create a mental model that can be communicated effectively, adopted successfully, executed efficiently, and reported on coherently. And this is why most of the AI strategies you see out there are worse than aspirational; they’re just human slop.
So, let’s talk about simple approaches to make AI effective for your organization. This works whether you’re a multi-trillion dollar behemoth or a single person start-up. It’s an easy answer to over-architected strategies and tiresome briefing papers.
The Strategy: Three Questions, No Fluff
Forget the 50-page briefing papers. If you can’t answer these three questions on the back of a napkin, you don’t have a strategy—you have a security blanket.
1. The Market Reality: Are we Inventing, Improving, or just Inhaling?
Stop looking at "AI" as a monolith. You need to categorize your usage against the market:
- The Buy: Where are we just consumers of someone else's tools?
- The Build: Where are we actually creating a proprietary edge?
- The Threat: Where are our competitors using this to make our core product irrelevant?
If you can't map your position relative to the buyers and sellers around you, you’re not a player; you’re the yield.
2. The Resource Cold War: Lead, Peer, or Lag?
You cannot win every front. A "Lead" strategy across the board is a fast track to bankruptcy.
- Lead: We dump the lions' share of capital and talent here to beat the market.
- Peer: We do just enough to stay in the conversation and not look like luddites.
- Lag: We intentionally wait. We let others burn their R&D budgets solving the "first-mover" bugs, and we adopt when the tech is cheap and boring.
Strategy is the art of deciding what you are willing to lose at.
3. The Kinetic Workforce: Permission vs. Power
This is where the "social permission" hits the floor.
- Does the workforce have the permission to fail with these tools, or is the policy so restrictive they’re using "Shadow AI" under the desk?
- Do they have the power (the skills and compute) to actually change how they work, or are we just asking them to do their old jobs faster?
A workforce that fears the tool will never find the outcome.
The Loop
That’s it. Answer those questions. If there’s a disagreement, resolve it with data, not "vibes." Execute in small, violent bursts of activity. Measure the wreckage or the windfall. Then, do it again.
In a market this volatile, "consistent sense-making" beats a "five-year plan" every single time.