Let's explore a generic, straw-man corporate AI strategy and why doing AI right is may be more emotional than intellectual. It’s about staying grounded and, ultimately, about letting go and accepting risk.
Letting go is hard. When you set out to create a strategy in a room full of people with different goals and emotions there's natural pressure to settle on a plan. It's relatively easy, and feels safer, to define a list of tangible steps to make this and that incrementally better. Tangibility is seductive, especially in AI, where things move fast and what looks easy can quickly become difficult.
Here’s the catch: it’s just as important to respect risk. Things won’t always go your way. You can’t win everywhere, and you certainly can’t boil the ocean. A strong strategy needs to identify where to put your chips down and hopefully use AI to deliver a truly meaningful strategic impact. Automating this or that may provide value, but it also exposes you to countless small but expensive disappointments when the AI world doesn’t unfold exactly as planned.
Emotionally, this is tough. Planning for failure, and for not even knowing where failure might occur among the million potential AI applications, is uncomfortable.
A subtler challenge is that productivity isn’t just about turning a crank harder. Anyone who’s spent time in a white-collar environment knows it’s often about organizational friction: waiting for approvals, permission bottlenecks, conflicting stakeholders. If we want to unlock radically enhanced productivity, the very shape of the organization has to change. Not every part of the machine can simply get bigger. Some areas will need to shrink or get leaner or simply experience the terror of change. Some initiatives, while possible and potentially valuable, aren’t strategic priorities and don’t deserve resources.
This is where culture matters. A grounded organization has the "emotional" strength to accept trade-offs, take calculated risks, and let go where needed. That emotional grounding positions you to build a strategy capable of delivering real, game-changing impact ... rather than a plan that delivers a lot of disappointing, but occasionally expensive, pilots.
In AI, the lesson is intellectually simple but emotionally profound: let go, focus on what truly moves the needle, and accept the risks in that decision.