Do You Have an AI Strategy or Just a Rollout?
MIT Sloan calls 2026 the “level-set” year for AI. The hype is cooling and the real work is starting.
More training. More tools. Less progress. Sound familiar?
A client told me, quite frustrated: "We've done training after training. Different tools, different platforms. And we're still not moving forward."
The frustration wasn't about the technology. It was about the fact that nobody had planned how the team worked together around AI.
That's the real problem. And MIT Sloan just confirmed it. Thomas Davenport and Randy Bean call 2026 a "level-set" year. The hype is cooling. The real work is starting. The real work has nothing to do with algorithms.
→ Agentic AI is still not end-to-end and maybe for the better. You need people checking the work, judging, challenging. That's leadership design, not IT.
→ Productivity gains stay individual until you redesign how teams collaborate around AI. That's change management.
→ 38% of enterprises now have a Chief AI Officer. But nobody agrees where that role belongs. And that mixes up accountability.
→ The companies winning are building AI into how they operate. Methods, data, governance, learning loops, all of it.
The big challenge remains the human experience of AI inside your organization. Who supports teams? Who sets the rules? Who decides what's safe?
No answer to those questions means you don't have a strategy. You have a rollout.
So, do you have a strategy, or a rollout?
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The five questions that separate strategy from rollout
In the work I do with senior teams on AI adoption, five questions reliably separate the organisations with a real strategy from the ones with an expensive rollout.
→ Who is accountable for AI outcomes, not just AI adoption? A "Chief AI Officer" role that nobody knows where to put is a signal of strategy gap, not strategy execution.
→ How will AI change how teams collaborate, not just how individuals work? Productivity gains stay individual until you redesign the collaboration around them.
→ What stops being human, and what stays human deliberately? Without this conversation, you drift toward whatever the tools default to.
→ How do you handle the skeptic on the leadership team? If they are silenced, they are waiting. If they are heard, they often become the most useful AI critic the team has.
→ What does success look like in 12 months that you would all bet on together? If the answer is fuzzy, the strategy is fuzzy.
This is fundamentally a Secure Base Leadership question. The teams that get to clear AI strategy are the ones with enough psychological safety to surface disagreement before it becomes operational damage. The teams that drift into expensive rollouts are the ones avoiding that conversation.
The MIT Sloan piece by Davenport and Bean is worth reading carefully because it names what most strategy decks dance around: AI works inside organisations that have already done their leadership work, and fails inside the ones that have not.
If you want a practical tool for the conversation, my free What AI Can't Hear pack includes ten practical questions you can use with your team to talk about AI clearly, without fear or confusion. Leave your email here to download it: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources
If you are building real AI leadership inside your organisation, my Private AI Advisory is for senior teams doing exactly this work. Learn more here.
https://www.thechangerepublic.com/private-ai