The Strategy You Already Have Isn’t the Problem
I want to share something I’ve been hearing on almost every client call for the last six months. It comes in different words, but it’s always the same conversation. Their AI strategy gaps.
“We’ve been to the workshops. We had the leadership offsite. We hired a consultant — sometimes two. We have the deck. We have the strategy. We have the KPIs. We have an AI champion and a Slack channel and a quarterly review on the calendar.”
Then a pause.
“And nothing is actually happening.”
I used to think the problem with AI adoption was that companies didn’t understand the technology well enough. So we wrote frameworks. We ran trainings. We built the kind of educational content that gets people to nod and say, “Okay, now I get it.”
I wasn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just that the problem has moved.
Here’s where it moved to. Every leader I talk to today already gets it. They’ve watched the keynotes. They’ve read the McKinsey reports. They’ve watched their analysts demo a five-minute prompt that did three hours of work. They are not, in any meaningful sense, uneducated about generative AI.
What they don’t know is what to do about it on Monday morning, in the org they actually have, with the budget they actually have, and the people who actually report to them.
That’s not a knowledge gap; that’s an execution gap, and it’s a much harder problem.
Why the strategy work doesn’t bridge the gap
Most “AI strategy” work stops at the part that’s fun: vision statements, use case mapping, and maturity models with little blue dots. The deliverable is a deck that says, “here’s where AI fits in your business.” Then everyone goes back to their inbox.
Strategy firms hand you a roadmap and leave. Engineering shops hand you a pilot and leave. There’s a missing middle that no one wants to claim. It’s the part where you identify who does the work, how the workflow changes, what decisions shift, and how you’ll assess if it’s working in three months.
That middle is the whole game, and it’s the part that doesn’t fit on a slide.
The diagnostic question
If you want to test whether your AI work has crossed the gap, here’s the question I use:
Can you name an AI workflow that will be active in your business in 30 days? It should have an assigned owner, a clear input, a measurable output, and someone to confirm it’s working.
If the answer is “well, we have a strategy that says…” — you’re still in the gap.
If the answer is “we’re piloting a few things…” — you might be in the gap. Pilots without owners and success metrics are usually busywork in a fancy hat.
If the answer is a sentence with a name, a workflow, and a number — congratulations. You’re past it.
Most teams I talk to are not past it. And it’s not because their strategy is wrong. It’s because there’s no operating model underneath the strategy that turns “we will use AI” into “Brian uses AI to do this specific thing by Thursday and reports the results on Friday.”
This is the work that’s missing
For the last year we’ve been turning the work we do with our consulting clients into something a leader can run on their own. Not another AI primer. Not twenty hours of video about prompt engineering. A self-paced course that walks you through the work between strategy and execution — the work almost nobody is teaching because it’s not as glamorous as the demo. Go at your own pace. Rewatch the parts you need. Skip the parts you don’t.
It’s called The AI-Ready Strategist. It’s built around the three frameworks we use with every consulting client: the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ (the readiness lens that forces you to start with a measurable question instead of a tool), TRIPS (the scoring system that tells you which tasks to hand to AI first, and which ones to keep firmly in human hands), and the 6C Data Quality Framework (the foundational work without which none of the rest is safe).
It is the work I wish every team had done before they hired us. Some teams will still need to hire us — that’s fine. But most won’t if they do this work first.
Over the next three weeks, I’m going to walk through each of these frameworks, because the missing middle between “we have a strategy” and “we have an AI workflow producing results” is where every team I talk to is stuck. If you’ve got the deck and not the workflow, this series is for you.
The AI-Ready Strategist: academy.trustinsights.ai/courses/ai-ready-strategist
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– Katie Robbert, CEO
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