This is stupid, let’s fix it

You don't need an AI strategy. You need wins. I spent 13 years at IDEO watching orgs make the same mistake with design thinking that they're making with AI right now:

They interview stakeholders.
They build a beautiful matrix of prioritized use cases.
Then they pilot whichever ones scored highest on the 2x2.
Six months and a few hundred thousand dollars later, they kill it.

S&P Global found that 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025—up from 17% in 2024. That number will keep climbing, because the playbook most companies are running is broken at step one. They ask "where could we use AI?" They get fifty ideas. They score them. They pick the shiniest one. But shiny isn't the same as urgent. And a use case isn't a problem.

Same pattern every time. Someone asks "where should we use AI?" Everyone brainstorms. You pilot a hunch instead of fixing a problem you actually have. Six months later, it's dead.

The companies getting real results do the opposite. They find one bottleneck, fix it, and let momentum do the rest.

Meanwhile, your ops team is still copying data between three systems by hand. Your sales team is still spending half their day on work a machine should do. The bottleneck everyone can see but nobody's fixing—that's where the money is.

I helped a B2B SaaS company do exactly this: Their inbound team was drowning in manual qualification—not an "AI use case," just an obvious chokepoint everyone had been stepping over. One week to build. Four weeks to scale. Their whole inbound team shifted to outbound selling.

Cloud networking company, same deal: sales reps burning four hours per customer on pre-call research. One AI tool. A million hours back per year.

Neither started with a strategy offsite.
Both started with someone finally saying "this is stupid, let's fix it."

Then something clicks. You ship one win, look across the org, and ask "where else does this pattern exist?" The strategy emerges from doing—not from a deck.

If your team is caught between "we know AI matters" and "we have no idea where to start," let’s get that first win.


—
Sources:
S&P Global / 451 Research: "Voice of the Enterprise: AI & Machine Learning, Use Cases 2025"

"The State of AI in 2025: Agents, Innovation, and Transformation," Singla et al, Nov 2025