AI Strategy

Because a business case is a tool of isolation: it evaluates one initiative against its own costs and returns, and cannot see whether initiatives reinforce or undermine each other. S&P Global’s 2025 analysis found 42% of organisations scrapped most of their AI initiatives; in my reading they were rarely technical failures. The opening article sets out why accumulating approvals fragments capability rather than compounding it.

Rumelt’s three elements: a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy for addressing it, and coherent actions that reinforce one another. In this briefing the diagnosis is the Six Board Concerns as an interconnected system, the guiding policy is the Complete AI Adoption Framework, the lineage that became Remake, and the actions are a sequenced playbook running from AI amnesty to scaling. A document that cannot show all three is a plan for spending, not a strategy.

No, and I would treat the variation as an asset. Marketing racing ahead and finance moving deliberately is the natural shape of AI adoption; forcing a uniform pace wastes the leaders’ advantage and rushes the laggards’ foundations. The guiding policy article shows how advanced functions become learning laboratories whose governance and capabilities pull others forward, provided the Board orchestrates the speeds rather than synchronising them.

Start with amnesty, not prohibition. MIT’s 2025 State of AI in Business report found workers at over 90% of organisations using personal AI tools, and that ungoverned activity is evidence of where value actually lives. The coherent actions playbook opens with a 30-day amnesty precisely because visibility has to precede governance; suppression drives the innovation deeper underground while the risks remain.

Treat tool counts and pilot wins with suspicion; they are the raw material of the maturity mirage. Map each function against the AI Stages of Adoption, test capability balance across the Five Pillars, and watch one indicator in particular: pilots that consistently fail to scale within six months mean the organisation is still Experimenting, whatever the deck says. The return of traditional AI adds the companion question: are we deploying the right kind of AI for the problem at all?

The Board, and in my experience nobody below it. The people closest to a piece of work are the least likely to conclude that it should stop, because their expertise, their team, and often their standing are bound up in it continuing. That is why the question that comes before any tool decision, how the work is done today and whether it still needs doing, is a governance question rather than a procurement one. Not everything needs AI argues that the most valuable answer is sometimes that the work should stop, and that a well-judged no is what makes every AI yes credible.

Sequenced, each action building the capability the next one needs. The coherent actions playbook opens on Day 1 with an AI amnesty, a 30-day window for disclosing the tools people already use, then stands up an AI Centre of Excellence to turn those discoveries into governed capability. Quarter 1 orchestrates the portfolio, Quarter 2 installs leading, lagging, and predictive metrics mapped to the Six Board Concerns model, and Quarters 3 and 4 scale what worked and retire what did not. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Board Survey found 69% of Boards discussing AI regularly and 33% feeling equipped to oversee it; the playbook is written to close that gap.

The parts a business case cannot supply. The opening article asks the Board to stop being an approval gate for individual cases and become the orchestrator of the whole: owning the diagnosis of the challenge, the guiding policy that aligns initiatives with it, and the test of whether each initiative builds capability rather than merely clearing a return hurdle. The playbook’s boardroom commitment adds what only a Board can give: patient capital that prioritises learning over immediate returns, oversight that keeps pace with AI instead of the quarterly cycle, and a willingness to use the tools itself. Management runs the initiatives; the Board owns whether they add up.