The AI Strategy Myth: What No One Tells You (Because They’re Selling It)
- Rich Washburn
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Forget the hype, the frameworks, and the “AI roadmaps.” Here’s what actually works.
Let’s get this out of the way: most AI “strategies” are theater. Decks. Demos. Buzzwords wrapped in billable hours. You’ve seen it. A consultant rolls in with a 70-slide presentation full of “maturity matrices” and “transformation frameworks.” They talk about aligning AI to business objectives, governance layers, and something-something operational synergy. And yet—three months later, your team’s still manually retyping customer data into spreadsheets.
Here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud:You don’t need an “AI strategy” to start winning with AI. You need a reason and a result.
Everything else is scaffolding built to justify someone’s retainer.
The Curtain Pull
The dirty secret of the AI consulting world is that half of what they sell you is permission — permission to do what your team could’ve done already if they weren’t waiting for someone to bless it with jargon.
I’ve seen companies waste six figures “developing an AI roadmap” that could’ve been replaced with one afternoon of shadowing their staff and asking:
“Hey, what’s the one task that makes you hate your job a little?”
That’s your starting point. That’s your goldmine.
AI doesn’t need a framework; it needs friction. Find the pain. Fix the pain. Repeat.
The Loose Screw Rule
Every business is a machine held together by a few loose screws — the tasks everyone hates but nobody questions. The manual data entry. The copy-paste loops. The “we’ve always done it this way” workflows that somehow survived three software upgrades and a pandemic.
Those are your leverage points. Fix just one, and you’ll feel the shift immediately — morale, efficiency, credibility, all of it.
One of my favorite examples: a client’s internal ops guy built a GPT-based assistant to scrape info from emails into their CRM. Took him a weekend. Saved his team dozens of hours a week. He called it Ginger.
No million-dollar AI initiative. No strategy retreat in Aspen. Just a person who saw a screw loose and tightened it. That’s what real AI adoption looks like — small, fast, almost invisible at first… until it isn’t.
The Quick Win Effect
The first time your team sees a painful, soul-sucking task vanish because of AI, everything changes. The skepticism evaporates. The conversations shift from “Will this replace me?” to “Can it help with this too?”
I’ve watched it happen a dozen times — the moment where the tool stops being “tech” and starts being team. That’s when you know the culture has cracked open.
And here’s the part consultants won’t tell you: you can’t buy that shift. You have to earn it. Not with strategy decks — with results your people can feel in their day-to-day work.
The Real Strategy (That No One Can Package)
If you want an “AI strategy” that actually works, here it is — and you can steal it, print it, put my name on it, I don’t care:
Start where it hurts. Find the friction.
Fix something small. Prove the point.
Show the result. Let your people feel the win.
Ask what’s next. Build from there.
That’s it. No framework. No consultant. Just curiosity, empathy, and iteration. The irony is, this is how innovation actually happens — quietly, inside the workflow, not on a PowerPoint slide.
The Fear Factor
Here’s another inconvenient truth: most AI strategies fail not because of technology, but because of psychology.
People don’t fear AI. They fear irrelevance.
That’s why your rollout has to be about liberation, not replacement. Frame AI as a way to get rid of the junk work — the mindless, repetitive stuff that nobody’s proud of doing anyway. When you do that, your team stops bracing for impact and starts volunteering ideas. They want in.
That’s how you turn users into advocates. That’s how culture changes — not from the top down, but from the ground up.
The Scalability Trap
Once the wins start rolling in, resist the urge to automate everything.The same momentum that powers transformation can fuel chaos if you move too fast without connection. Don’t build a zoo of disconnected bots. Build a system. One fix at a time, but all under the same philosophy:
“If it saves time, reduces friction, or boosts creativity — it’s in.”
That’s how small wins turn into an ecosystem.That’s how an insurance firm with one “Ginger” bot ended up running a half-dozen automations that now save hundreds of hours a month — all built by the people who actually use them.
The Culture Flip
The real prize isn’t automation — it’s awareness.
When people start looking for what AI can do instead of fearing what it might do, you’ve changed the operating system of your company. They stop accepting friction as inevitable. They start asking better questions.
That’s what an AI-powered culture looks like — not machines replacing people, but people finally free to think like innovators again.
The End of the AI Strategy Era
We’re about to hit a breaking point. In a world where anyone can spin up a GPT in an afternoon, the value isn’t in the tools anymore — it’s in how fast and how fearlessly you use them.
So here’s my unfiltered advice to every leader, founder, and exec reading this:
Stop planning. Start fixing. Stop buying frameworks. Start finding friction. Stop outsourcing your curiosity. Start building it in-house.
AI isn’t magic. It’s just leverage — and leverage belongs to the people who actually pull the handle.
Final Thought: The Cheat Code
If there’s a cheat code here, it’s this:Don’t chase AI strategy. Chase AI fluency.
Teach your people to see problems differently.Give them permission to experiment.And celebrate the ones who build something that works — even if it’s not perfect. That’s the real revolution.Not another buzzword-filled roadmap. Not another “AI adoption framework.”
Just humans + curiosity + the courage to fix what’s broken.
Pull back the curtain, and you’ll see: That’s all the strategy you ever needed.
And One More Thing…
If — at any point — a vendor, consultant, or “strategic partner” starts pitching you on the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem as the AI strategy for your business… you need to stop the conversation right there.
Not pause. Stop.
Because what’s happening next isn’t strategy — it’s sales theater. It’s someone trying to staple their quota to your future. If the only reason they’re pushing Copilot is “because it’s Microsoft,” that’s not innovation — that’s laziness wearing a polo shirt.
Here’s the move: run. Pull the ejection handle. Cancel the demo. Make polite excuses if you must. Whatever it takes — get out of that room.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Copilot, but any vendor selling it as the only way forward is waving a giant red flag that says, “I get paid to sell you the default.”
Real AI strategy is tool-agnostic. It’s about outcomes, not ecosystems. If they can’t start from your problems before naming their platform, they don’t understand strategy — they understand margins.
So yeah. Run, dude. Run.