You don't need an AI strategy

There is no doubt that AI represents a foundational technological shift for the Information Age. The last such shift was that of Mobile & Cloud, where we saw solution development and distribution become easier than ever. The new user interface (the smartphone) made these solutions easier to adopt and more accessible. Now we see interfaces becoming conversational. Data can be accessed, evaluated, analysed, manipulated, forecasted, and presented in a free flowing conversation. Workflows can be transformed to take out time-consuming tasks and turn them into a set of review iterations. The research that proves this has already been conducted by Harvard Business School in 2023: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700. Access to an interface underpinned by a model like GPT-4 can allow an individual to get more done (12.2%, get it done quicker (25.1%), but most notably, get it done to a significantly higher quality (40%+)! Many organisations spent well over a year marveling at this technology and putting in place AI policies and IT governance controls. Some implemented Office365 Copilot to varying degrees of successful adoption. Very few grabbed the bull by the horns and tried to see what they could truly unlock with GenAI, or adopt a "What if with AI" mindset. The narrative of 2024 was: you need an AI strategy. Everyone froze until they figured out what they should do. Meanwhile, the technology has continued to evolve, introducing fancy new terms like "Agentic Architecture" and allowing many other players to catch up with OpenAI's progress.

The best way to describe the rate of progress in AI over the past 12 months is...exhausting. There are so many new models, tools, architectures, and risks to grapple with. It re-enforces a narrative of taking a strategic approach and setting up the right foundations before beginning to venture into AI. We’ve been here before. The premise of many digital transformation programmes over the past decade in the enterprise space was "spend big bucks, build a strategy, get your foundations right, and wait 3-5 years to transform and reap the rewards". This was a broken promise, with 70% of initiatives failing to meet their objectives. How do we not repeat this mistake?

The reality for most businesses is that they exist in a fast moving, volatile environment. They need to be able to learn at the speed of a startup, but deliver at the scale of a corporation. Those two things are very hard to do simultaneously, but if done well, they could create a faster path to value, and a glimpse or evidence of the transformation promise.

It’s too easy for people like ourselves who work in this space to focus on the need of a highly defined strategy, risk profile and data readiness to enable the change required to set your business up to take AI Advantage. This is why at Seen Ventures, we put a premium on experiential learning, and bringing a “What if with AI” mindset into organisations and teams to reimagine possibilities. We believe the impact of AI on your organisation shouldn’t be about having a few experts who propel your organisation forward, but rather a fully enabled organisation. The truth is, this is really hard to do with the rate of change in this emerging space, so our focus should be on setting up methods to enable fast feedback loops and experiential learning. How do we bring people together, set a stage for everyone involved to be invested and have their “win”, and inspire curiosity to showcase the potential of the future?

We use the statement "you don't need an AI strategy" as a provocation. We are believers in strategic purpose and direction. But in an emerging space, your strategy will be as good as anything generated by your favourite reasoning LLM. Inform your strategy through wayfinding, experimentation, and experiential learning. If you don't have the capacity to do this yourself, talk to us and we'll help you generate the momentum you need to create an insight-driven approach to empowering your team and revolutionising operations. And yes, by adopting this approach you can help define a more tangible AI strategy too.

Over the coming days and weeks, we will share some insights of what we are learning, and how you could make a start on your AI experimentation journey and adopting a "What if with AI" mindset.