Your business doesn't need an AI strategy. It needs answers to five questions

The most common request I get from business leaders is also the vaguest one: help us with an AI strategy.

The request usually arrives after a board meeting, a conference, or a competitor’s announcement. Somebody senior has decided the company is behind, and the cure for being behind is assumed to be a document. I have sat in enough of these rooms now, with companies in fuel distribution, transport, media, interiors, and education, to know how the document version of this story ends. The strategy gets written. It names technologies and quarters. It gets presented once, praised, filed, and quietly outlived by the business it was written for.

The problem is not effort. The problem is that “AI strategy” is an answer to the wrong question. Nobody in the building is sure what question it answers, which is exactly why it feels safe to commission.

Here is what I ask instead. Five questions, in order, and I have yet to meet an organisation that could answer all five and still not know what to do.

One: what do your people actually do all day? Not the org chart version, the honest version. Where do the hours go? In most businesses I have seen, a surprising share of expensive time goes into reading something so it can be retyped somewhere else, or answering the same question for the fortieth time. You cannot point AI at your business until you can describe your business at this level, and most leadership teams cannot yet. This question alone is worth more than the strategy document.

Two: where does information sit and wait? Every business has queues where nothing moves until a specific person reads something: quotes waiting to be priced, invoices waiting to be matched, complaints waiting to be triaged, reports waiting to be summarised for the person above. AI is unusually good at exactly this kind of waiting-room work. Find the queues and you have found your first real use cases, without a consultant naming a single model.

Three: if you had the answer instantly, what would change? This is the question that kills the most projects, and it should kill them early. A dashboard that predicts demand is worthless if purchasing still happens the way it always has. If the answer to “what would you do differently” is nothing, the AI is decoration. Automate decisions somebody will actually act on.

Four: what do your people and customers already trust? I wrote last week about building Brik around WhatsApp and bank transfers instead of fighting them. The same law applies inside your company. A tool that lives where your staff already work gets used. A tool that asks them to move somewhere new gets abandoned by February. Adopt things that attach to existing behaviour. Be suspicious of things that require your people to become different people first.

Five: who owns the follow-through? Not a committee, a person. Every AI adoption I have watched succeed had someone whose name was on it, who used the thing weekly and had the authority to change a process when the tool exposed how broken it was. Every one I have watched fail was owned by everybody, which is to say nobody. If you cannot name the owner, you are not ready, and no strategy document will make you ready.

Notice what these questions have in common: none of them mention technology. They are questions about your business, and the reason they work is that AI adoption fails on the business side far more often than on the technical side. The models are the easy part now. Knowing your own queues, your own decisions, and your own owners is the hard part, and it is work a document cannot do for you.

So when someone offers to sell you an AI strategy, ask them which of these five questions it answers. And if you sit down with your leadership team and work through the five honestly, you will not need to buy one. You will have something better: a short list of specific things worth doing, each attached to a queue you can point at and an owner you can name.

That is a strategy. It just does not look like a document.

I write one of these every week, on AI and African business as they actually work. If your organisation is somewhere between the board meeting and the document, this is the conversation I keep having, and I am happy to have it with you.