Most organisations are still asking AI to make today’s business cheaper.
I think the more interesting strategic question is:
What can we now do that we previously thought was uneconomic?
That is a very different conversation.
For decades, organisations have made perfectly rational choices not to serve certain customer segments, personalise certain services, analyse certain datasets or redesign certain processes because the economics simply did not work.
Too much manual effort.
Too expensive.
Too slow.
Too difficult to scale.
AI has the potential to change some of those assumptions.
And that is where I think strategic advantage becomes interesting.
Because if every organisation uses AI simply to remove cost from an existing process, much of that advantage will eventually be competed away.
But what if AI allows you to do something that previously wasn’t commercially viable?
Could you serve a customer group you previously couldn’t profitably reach?
Could you offer a level of personalisation that previously required too much human intervention?
Could you analyse thousands of customer interactions continuously rather than relying on periodic research?
Could you turn expertise that currently sits with a small number of highly experienced people into something available much more widely across the organisation?
Could you create a product or service whose economics simply would not have worked five years ago?
That moves AI out of the productivity conversation and into the strategy conversation.
And I suspect it requires a different starting point.
Not:
“Where can we use AI?”
But:
“What have we historically chosen not to do because it was too expensive, too labour-intensive or too difficult to scale — and does that assumption still hold?”
Perhaps the real question is not whether organisations are asking this exact question.
It is whether they are asking enough questions that challenge the assumptions their current strategy was built on.
What questions are you asking about AI that go beyond productivity and cost?
Aileen Wallace is a non-executive and senior independent director with extensive experience in international multi-jurisdiction markets, focusing on return on investment and customer innovation through technology and skilled governance. As chair of multiple board committees, in public, private and family-owned environments, she supports pragmatic governance, engaging counsel and a framework for future-ready decision-making. Aileen helps boards navigate growth, risk and global complexity, with a particular interest in expanding international markets, strengthening customer propositions and delivering sustainable long-term value.