The Secrets of AI Value Creation

9Crafting an AI Strategy

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

—Sun Tsu (military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer)

The implementation of AI in various business operations has been on the rise across organisations around the globe. However, most organisations lack a well‐defined strategy for AI implementation (Business Wire 2019; IBM 2022b). Although many start with tactical approaches and use cases, these often fail to create sustainable value. A disconnect between the AI strategy and enterprise strategy can lead to misalignment, organisational challenges, unrealistic expectations, and adoption problems at the executive level. Various AI achievers who have successfully created value with AI have demonstrated the importance of aligning their AI strategy with the broader enterprise strategy (Chui et al. 2022). However, this holds not just true for AI but also for the alignment of the overall digital and enterprise strategy (Ismail et al. 2017).

An effective AI strategy is designed to simplify the complexity of organisational operations for AI and to achieve alignment across the organisation. A well‐crafted AI strategy offers clear vision and direction for the use of AI, aligns it with the company's business operations, and provides a framework for planning, transparency, and knowledge‐sharing to create value. Last but not least, it is critical to identify the necessary value‐driving capabilities ...