Pedal, Wheel, Handbrake: Three Conversations Every AI Strategy Needs
Most companies assume they are behind the competition when it comes to having a well-articulated AI strategy. They might be surprised to learn that they aren’t. While there is a flurry of activity, that is not a reflection of clarity or direction.
While this isn’t a framework for building your strategy, it offers some elements worth thinking about: consider the gas pedal, steering wheel, and handbrake in your car (why handbrake and not brake? We’ll get to that).
The gas pedal is fundamentally about mindset: how fast do you want to go? Because the underlying technology is going fast, many people believe that they have to be going just as fast. That’s a false assumption, as one of the core improvements happening with this technology is being able to jump in without any training.
FOMO is pushing some speed-related decisions, likely fueled by news cycles and even social media claims rather than real evidence from talking with peers.
Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile and The Black Swan, would likely argue that you’re not in charge of the pace; the pace is in charge of you. There is some validity in this, as it’s near impossible for anyone to forecast AI progress, and perhaps even harder to forecast how your customers or competition may change in important ways because of AI. He would call this textbook Extremistan, meaning these events dramatically and disproportionately affect the outcomes. He may recommend going faster, and channeling a little Mario Andretti, who said “if everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.”
Whether that’s true or not, you have to adopt a stance. It can’t be left to each personality in the organization to choose their own pace. What’s the first word of your AI strategy: aggressive, thoughtful, cautious, world-beating, bet-the-farm?
The steering wheel is the direction: what’s in our toolbox, how can people experiment, what are our priorities? These are all directional questions.
Dr. Deming would argue this is where organizational structure, management systems, and cultural readiness become dominant factors in the discussion. Dr. Deming would point to the fact that breakdowns in systems and processes are a dominant reason for many transformational failures, technology-based ones included.
What do you want to accomplish? How agile will you be to adjust to both forced changes and designed improvements? Do you have control over both a set of good data and your core standard work? These are all questions that matter. To draw Sun Tzu into the fray: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
Finally, we get to the handbrake. The handbrake is both when and how hard you need to slow down. Are your resources so focused on AI that they’re forgetting the core of the business? Are budgets out of line, unable to keep up with a frantic pace of investment? Are we losing core knowledge as people turn over important tasks to a mean-finding agent? Are we hurting or confusing customers?
Everyone should be aware of these risks. So why a handbrake instead of a foot brake? Because I think someone different from those accelerating and steering should be pulling the handbrake when needed. Why? Those driving things forward should be experimenting, taking risks, failing, and learning, and all of that becomes harder if you know you’re also the primary risk manager at hand.
The handbrake doesn’t have to look like veto power and bureaucracy. It can be asking hard questions, forcing experiments to have good metrics and hypotheses, ensuring failed experiments don’t suck too many resources, and so on.
So while this isn’t the framework you use to build your strategy, you need to be thinking about, and talking about, all three elements.