Artificial intelligence is transforming every aspect of business. But the value organisations gain from it will depend less on how quickly they adopt new tools and more on whether they use AI to support long-term strategy, growth and resilience.
Across businesses, marketing teams are experimenting with content generation, HR is automating recruitment, finance is streamlining reporting and customer service is introducing AI-powered assistants. Yet this is only the beginning, with AI poised to reshape virtually every area of business.
Currently, individual initiatives may deliver efficiencies, but the organisations that will realise the greatest value from AI won’t necessarily be those adopting it the fastest, but those that manage it as a business-wide strategic transformation.
That distinction matters because many organisations are still treating AI as a collection of individual efficiency projects, rather than as a fundamental shift in how the business creates value.
Claire explains: “Most businesses are understandably in the experimentation stage with AI. As such, the predominant approach to AI adoption is tactical. But it is also often anchored in driving “efficiency”, which is usually code for cost reduction”.
Whilst there is value in experimentation and efficiency, real success will lie in taking a strategic approach to AI adoption. To ensure sustained growth and profitability, leadership teams will need to ensure that AI supports the organisation’s long-term strategy rather than becoming a collection of disconnected tools solving isolated problems.
AI won’t fix your business
While improving productivity and reducing costs is important, approaching AI solely as a cost-reduction tool can create significant challenges further down the line.
For example, businesses might risk making restructuring decisions that remove too much human intelligence from the organisation, or implementing AI solutions that optimise one department while creating inefficiencies in another. When changes are made in isolation, rather than as part of a joined-up strategy, organisations can simply shift inefficiencies from one area of the business to another instead of eliminating them.
As Claire explained: “AI isn’t going to fix your business. It’s simply going to reveal the issues that already exist.”
The starting point should never be, “What can AI do for us?” Instead, Claire believes leadership teams should begin by asking: “What are we trying to achieve as a business? Where are our biggest challenges, and where would we most like to improve?” Only once these questions are answered and clear should they ask: “How do we want to approach embracing AI in our business?”
“If you ground the conversation in how AI can unlock value, that’s a fundamentally different discussion from asking how AI can save money,” she says.
Grounding AI in a business strategy fundamentally changes the conversation. It shifts the focus away from saving money in the short term towards unlocking value over the long term.
Organisations need to operate as connected systems
Long before AI became a boardroom priority, successful organisations understood that the only way businesses can compete today is by operating as one cohesive system.
“Every department needs to be aligned around where the business is going, what it’s trying to achieve and how it’s going to get there,” says Claire. “That need becomes even greater as AI adoption accelerates.”
Businesses that operate in functional silos today face the greatest challenge. If marketing adopts AI independently from sales, or customer service automates processes without considering operations, customers can end up receiving fragmented experiences while internal teams duplicate effort and create unnecessary complexity. The result is the exact opposite of what AI is intended to achieve.
Claire explains: “Without that systemic approach, you risk driving inefficiency into the business. You also limit your ability to innovate, grow and create long-term value.”
Rather than increasing efficiency, businesses simply create new silos where the left hand no longer knows what the right hand is doing.
Leadership teams therefore need to ask not simply how individual departments are using AI, but how every AI initiative contributes to the organisation as a whole.
“The question all leaders should be asking is ‘Are we looking at this holistically?’”
AI should support strategy, not replace it
There is understandable pressure on businesses to move quickly.
New AI platforms appear almost daily, accompanied by headlines suggesting competitors are racing ahead. “There’s a huge amount of FOMO around AI. Many leaders think everyone else has cracked it, but the reality is that very few organisations have,” says Claire
The temptation is to identify an operational problem, purchase a piece of AI software that appears to solve it and move on to the next issue. However, this tactical approach often increases complexity and cost rather than reducing it. It may also explain why MIT’s 2025 report, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, found that 95% of organisations were getting no measurable return from their GenAI pilots.
“Rather than allowing AI to happen to you, leaders need to decide what AI should be for their business. “Technology should follow strategy, not define it.”
Don’t outsource your intelligence
“The future isn’t AI replacing humans. It’s humans and AI working together,” says Claire.
AI provides artificial intelligence, but organisational success will still rely on applied intelligence, the experience, judgement, creativity and critical thinking that people bring. “The job is to avoid unintentionally outsourcing your intelligence to AI. Protect what makes your organisation uniquely valuable.”
This is particularly important given the reality of today’s workplace. Claire warns: “One of the biggest risks is that AI becomes a coping strategy for overwhelmed employees. They hand more and more tasks over to AI, and what disappears is judgement, evaluation and critical thinking.”
“If organisations don’t think carefully about how people adopt AI, they’ll introduce unnecessary risks around data, reputation and decision-making.”
The goal should never be replacing people with AI. It should be enabling people to work better alongside it.
Build capability for the future
AI also requires organisations to think differently about talent. “Entry-level roles shouldn’t be viewed as something you can eliminate. The real question is how you evolve those roles to support your long-term talent strategy,” says Claire.
Junior professionals still need opportunities to learn their craft. They simply have the opportunity to do so using AI from day one.
If organisations stop developing future talent because technology can perform today’s tasks, they risk creating significant capability gaps in years to come.
Strategic AI adoption therefore requires leaders to ask not only what capabilities can be automated today, but what capabilities the organisation will need tomorrow.
AI is a leadership responsibility
AI is overwhelming, and it is understandable that some leadership teams have turned to creating AI specialist roles. Whilst this sort of specialist expertise will undoubtably be valuable, leaders cannot afford to delegate responsibility for AI adoption to one person or one function.
“Leaders need to ensure they are clear on their business strategy and understand what role AI can play in fulfilling it. This alignment is crucial to ensuring the AI expertise you do bring into the business is pointed in the right direction”.
We’ve seen this before. When digital first emerged, many organisations appointed Heads of Digital. Over time, it became clear that digital could not sit in one department because it touched every aspect of the business.
AI is no different. It cannot become someone else’s responsibility. It must become part of the organisation’s DNA, with leadership teams taking collective ownership for how it is governed, adopted and embedded across the business.
“Get your house in order first. That’s how you’ll get the most value from AI specialists.”
Think beyond today
Clearly, AI has the potential to transform the workplace but it is not without its challenges or risks. If ever there was a need for leaders to consider how decisions taken today might affect the business in the future it is now.
“AI makes a stewardship mindset more important than ever. Stewardship is about protecting the long-term future of your organisation.”
Leadership teams should consider every AI decision through four interconnected lenses: protecting their brand, their people, their customers and the planet.
For example, within the current discourse around AI adoption, there is a definite lack of discussion and consideration around sustainability. Claire believes that it is a huge part of the piece. “Sustainability may not be the most fashionable part of the AI conversation right now, but consumers will eventually join the dots and the brands who have not taken a systemic approach to AI adoption, who haven’t considered how it impacts their own sustainability agenda, will be caught out.”
The organisations that succeed will protect what makes them unique while using AI to enhance, not replace, the intelligence that already exists within the business.
Above all, they will resist the temptation to chase technology for technology’s sake. AI is not a business strategy. It is a powerful enabler of one.
Leadership teams that start with strategic clarity, align every department behind shared goals and adopt AI as part of a connected organisational system will be the ones that create lasting value long after today’s AI hype has passed.
By Claire Croft, founder of executive coaching business Claire Croft Associates
For more information, visit: https://clairecroft.co.uk
