What’s the Relationship Between Your Business Strategy and Your AI Strategy?

May 26, 2026 · 2 min read

Many organisations are building an AI strategy. That’s the category error.

AI isn’t a domain that needs its own strategy, the way procurement or treasury does. It’s closer to electricity — a general-purpose capability that reshapes whatever it’s pointed at. Strategies are built around outcomes: revenue, margin, defensibility, where the moat sits in five years. AI is one of the means by which those outcomes get pursued. Treating it as the object of strategy rather than an input to strategy is how organisations end up with hackathons, governance frameworks, and tool rollouts that don’t move any number the CEO actually cares about.

The more useful question is the inverse: take the three or four problems keeping the executive team up at night, and ask which of them are now tractable in ways they weren’t eighteen months ago. That’s a much shorter, more specific conversation — and it’s the one that produces work worth doing.

The governance question still matters, but it’s a second-order problem. Every governance committee tracks the downside of moving on AI. Almost none track the downside of standing still while a competitor moves.