Jumping into AI isn't a strategy

Something I keep seeing: companies dropping a strategy that was working to "go all in on AI."

The thing is, that old strategy didn't come from nowhere. Someone sat down and built it. They ran the numbers and made the case for it. So when it gets tossed out after a few months of hype, I always wonder which version was the unserious one.

What gets me is that if you ask a basic question, like what problem this is actually solving, a lot of the time there's no real answer. You hear stuff like "it's a strategic priority" or "leadership is really excited about it." That's not a use case, it's a mood. And AI pointed at a problem you haven't defined won't sort it out for you. It'll just hand you a faster, more confident version of the confusion you already had.

I'm not against using AI. I use it all the time. But using it well still means doing the unglamorous part: figuring out the actual problem, what it costs, what you expect to get back, and how you'd know if it worked. AI doesn't make that part go away. It just makes it easy to skip, because it feels like everyone else is skipping it too.

The companies that end up doing well with this won't be the fastest ones. They'll be the ones who got excited and still did the homework.

The tools got smarter overnight. The thinking still has to be done the slow way.