Your AI Strategy: If It's Hard, You're Doing It Wrong
If I had a bitcoin for every time a client dismissed a "consulting strategy" as a waste of time, I'd have a much fuller digital wallet. I've seen countless AI initiatives stall or implode from the absence of strategy. But I get it: who has the budget or patience for lengthy PowerPoint decks, especially when securing resources feels impossible right now?
McKinsey’s 2025 workplace survey finds leadership alignment, not engineering talent, is now the biggest barrier to scaled AI value. And Gartner warns that 30% of Gen AI pilots will die after proof-of-concept when teams chase “AI for AI’s sake.” Meanwhile, platforms release new models monthly, shrinking experiment costs, and capital markets reward firms that publish a working roadmap—IBM Consulting links mature roadmaps to a 15% valuation premium.
McKinsey: Superagency in the workplace (2025)
The bottom line: no roadmap = strategic negligence
Scared? Don't be. I have some excellent news: what used to cost $200K+ and require an army of consultants now takes just a week or two, a clear framework, and some savvy use of AI. What you gain isn't just another strategy document, but an actionable plan tied to real business results that you can start implementing tomorrow.
How Pacesetters Made AI Strategy Obvious
Brands making AI strategy visible and actionable are setting themselves up to win.
- HubSpot’s AI strategy, branded as “Breeze,” integrates AI across its CRM platform to enhance marketing, sales, and service functions. Breeze comprises tools like Copilot for task assistance, Agents for workflow automation, and Intelligence for data enrichment. The company has established specialized roles, such as AI Prompt & Solutions Engineers, to support AI adoption and training within teams. This structured approach ensures that AI initiatives align with business objectives and improve operational efficiency.
- Canva launched the “AI Everywhere” initiative in early 2024, aiming to embed AI tools and training across all departments. This program evolved into “AI Impact” in 2025, focusing on leveraging AI to enhance productivity and creativity company-wide. By equipping over 5,000 employees with AI capabilities, Canva ensures that AI integration supports various business functions, from design to customer support.
- Stitch Fix has integrated AI into its core operations, using algorithms to personalize styling recommendations and manage inventory. The company combines AI-driven insights with human stylists to deliver customized clothing selections to clients. Additionally, Stitch Fix employs generative AI to assist stylists in crafting personalized notes for customers, enhancing the overall shopping experience.
What links these examples: Each company embeds AI into daily workflows with lean specialist teams, dog-foods the tools internally, and scales only the projects that prove clear business impact.
The Five-Step Catch-Up Plan
The approach we take at AGNTCY is effectively a tried & true digital transformation model, but what makes it different is that it is a living breathing document vs a once and done slide deck. Here’s it is:
1. Align on a North Star
Agree on a single, outcome-based metric such as “increase qualified leads by 20% in 6 months.” A lone target concentrates talent and budget, shuts down vanity pilots, and gives executives a scoreboard everyone understands.
How AI helps: Feed last year’s performance data or OKRs into ChatGPT and ask it to draft candidate North Star metrics with benchmark ranges.
2. Audit Reality: Data, Tech, Talent and Workflows
Score your team capabilities & workflows, deliverables/outputs, and technology and data infrastructure against a simple readiness matrix so invisible gaps don’t ambush delivery later. This snapshot surfaces the blockers like governance holes, missing skill sets, tech or data deficits—all of the things that get in the way of a solid AI program.
How AI helps: Use an AI agent to survey your people as a starting point for the audit, then use Gen AI to help design and conduct the audit and provide you the results in an easy to digest read-out format (think a one-page heat map instead of a 200 page consultant deck).
3. Ideate and Prioritize Use Cases
Brainstorm widely in a collaborative workshop, then rank ideas by business impact and level of effort so focus lands on initiatives that move the North Star without stalling on red-tape. A tight portfolio doubles success odds and curbs “AI tourism.”
How AI helps: Generative AI can help you augment your use case inventory with fresh ideas, before rapidly plotting them on a 2x2 matrix for easy consumption.
4. Draft the Strategic Blueprint
Translate your top priorities into an easy-to-socialize one-pager and an accompanying set of tactical briefs and a timeline view. I personally love the OGST (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Tactics) framework for the one-pager, as it's super simple to build and easy for leaders to digest. Shout out to my old friends from Ant's Eye View for introducing me to the wonderful world of OGST all those years ago!
How AI helps: Paste workshop notes and scores into your favorite LLM; the model returns a clean roadmap with milestones, owners, and budget bands that you tweak.
5. Run 60-Day Sprints—Review & Repeat
Launch pilots in an agile way, measure results, and either double-down or kill quickly; bi-monthly retros keep momentum high and blockers visible before they fester. In tandem, produce a dashboard of the pilots so that you can keep your finger on the pulse, automatically update the strategy in real-time (the living, breathing part), and celebrate wins as well as failures.
How AI helps: AI vibecoding tools can be used to generate the live dashboard. AI agents collect weekly updates on pilots to feed into the dashboard. LLMs help auto-generate experiment read-outs, compare them to the North Star, and propose the next set of pilots from the backlog.
Side note: This last step gets into the people & change aspects of AI, which we'll touch on in our next issue of The AI Model.
Follow these steps and you can move from blank page to a clear path forward, one that is scrappy, yet well-orchestrated and leadership-approved!
Key Takeaways for Leaders
- Strategic blueprints / roadmaps equals credibility. Investors and employees now grade AI maturity like they once graded digital.
- Orchestrated squads beat bloated centers. Case studies show lean cores plus local champions scale faster than heavyweight COEs.
- Let AI do the grunt work. Spend judgment on substance, not formatting. Give AI the heavy lifting so you can focus on telling the story.
Like what you read? Want to learn more? Reach out to: eliot@agntcy.ai
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