AI is everywhere in strategy decks. But in real business decisions? Almost nowhere.
Raffael Schilling and Julian Kawohl spoke with 35+ strategy and innovation leaders across large European companies (2,000–300,000 employees) and tested their hypothesis with a prototype inside a multinational technology company. What they found reveals why AI often fails to deliver transformational impact.
1️⃣ The Gap
In keynotes and boardrooms, AI is hailed as “transforming business.” In reality, it mostly rewrites slides, summarizes reports, or brainstorms ideas. Strategy itself still runs on multi-year plans, formal approvals, and periodic reviews. Meanwhile, markets move continuously. One-year-old strategies can already be partially wrong, with no mechanism to trigger updates.
Insight: The problem isn’t technology—it’s the space between strategy and execution, where strategy needs to be explained, contextualized, and made relevant for those doing the work.
2️⃣ The Load
Execution doesn’t fail—it gets overloaded.
Managers must keep delivery on track, absorb constant strategic change, explain shifting priorities, and make decisions with incomplete information. Even with OKRs and progress tracking, frameworks can’t resolve ambiguity or competing priorities. AI could help reduce friction by answering questions or surfacing changes, but once you move closer to execution, operational constraints appear.
3️⃣ The Stall
AI works great in analysis. But it quietly stops when it touches real decisions.
Data is sensitive. Trust matters. Teams are overloaded with tools. Adding AI often feels like one more system to maintain. Leaders imagine an ideal “always-on strategy” powered by a digital twin of operations—but implementing this requires years of integration and adoption. This is an operating-model problem, not a tooling problem.
4️⃣ The Experiment
If you can’t rebuild the company or rely on a “strategy AI tool,” what can you do? We ran a test inside a global technology company, building a small end-to-end prototype (workflow + simple frontend, outside existing processes). The goal wasn’t automation—it was better thinking under real conditions. Key principles:
Structure context before analysis
Break complex reasoning into explicit steps
Keep humans accountable for decisions
This was AI enabling strategy, not replacing it. Reality decided the outcome.
5️⃣ The Learning
From this experiment, three lessons became clear:
Structure creates clarity, AI alone does not.
Human-in-the-loop is essential—strategy only works when humans are accountable.
Strategy needs operations—recommendations only matter if used in workflows and continuously updated with reality.
Conclusion: AI doesn’t fix strategy problems. Operationalized strategy unlocks AI’s real value.
Startups: Build a data culture and a digital twin of operations to gain leverage.
Large companies: Prioritize operational data, reduce silos, and design orchestration layers—not just tools.
→ Where would an operations-first strategy break in your organization today?
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