I've sat in enough strategic planning sessions to recognize the pattern. An organization hears that AI can automate workflows, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. Leadership gets excited. A tool gets purchased. And six months later, nobody can tell you whether it worked, because nobody defined what 'working' was supposed to look like.
This is why strategy shouldn’t be thrown away in the age of AI. The foundation of any strategy is to understand and this is critical to building out your AI solution.
Compliance Alone Isn't a Strategy
A lot of what passes for AI governance today is really AI compliance. It involves making sure you've checked the right boxes, avoided the obvious legal risks, and documented policies. While compliance matters, governance is much more expansive. AI governance asks:
What problems are we actually trying to solve?
What do our people need to do their best work?
What does our community or constituency expect from us?
How does AI serve our mission, not just our efficiency?
This is more about organizational development than IT and should be explored and clarified before anyone opens a vendor contract.
OD Is the Missing Ingredient in Most AI Strategies
Organizational development is the discipline of understanding how people, culture, systems, and structure interact to produce outcomes. It's fundamentally about alignment of values and actions.When OD principles are used to build an AI strategy, employees aren't just trained on a new tool. Instead, they become part of the conversation that defines how and why it will be used. The organization's vision not AI hype becomes the filter to evaluate for AI decisions. It gives the users a voice in shaping the deployment.
Where to Start?
Before your organization adopts, expands, or governs AI, define
1) What are we trying to accomplish that we currently can't?
2) What's getting in the way?
3) How and if AI actually addresses our issues
4) What deeper organizational issues will AI adoption actually just mask?
These are the hard questions that ensure AI strategies are sustainable and successful.
If your organization is navigating what an AI strategy should actually look like beyond the tools and the compliance checklist, let's talk.
I work at the intersection of AI governance and organizational development.
Reach out at TawanaTownsendConsulting.com.