The Best AI Strategy Is Absurdly Tactical
The strategic, unanswered (?) questions seem to be bigger than life, huge height of falling. The answer is simple: a laptop in a room.
The picture is the answer, honestly.
Nobody has the AI answers yet. (Altough I start thinking that’s just a thing we keep saying. probably we know more than we acknowledge.) The books aren’t written. But we already know something that works in the moment: something works: people sitting together, fiddling with a laptop, building their first agent. And the next and the next. Just doing it, no overthinking. No committees, no processes. The moment the first agent runs, changes everything. If you achieve that moment with a CEO, the whole company is accelerated. That tactic is the strategy of the moment. Everything else is second rate in this moment.
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Insane Questions, insane height of falling
Where does AI lead your company? Your career? Society? What’s the end game?
Is it the singularity? Does it kill jobs, or does it only shift work around in dimensions unseen? The back pushers, who still try to deny it entirely. “It’s not as good as humans”. (Sure, but who cares? It’s amazingly betters in parts. It’s always on, it’s eager. It’s productive as hell.) You have complete polarisation: Some predict the future with perfect certainty. Then the doomers. The hype attention economists. All opinion, no answer.
Funny note: A week ago or so I was on a LinkedIn thread in which people complained about people complaining they have a hard time working when the tokens don’t keep coming. To them that seemed like bragging. They couldn’t imaging that there are people, working professionals, in systems that rely on tokens.
The predictions contradict each other. It’s not that people are stupid but because this thing is still partly unknowable right now.(Again, I think it became much more predictable since maybe 3-4 months. The monster showed it’s head: It can pragmatically can do more that we thought.) We’re in 1995 internet territory. The infrastructure is here. The value systems on top of it are not. We’re all fumbling.
And I mean all of us. Me included.
The simple pattern that I see working over and over again
The solution of the moment is absurdly simple.
Given the enormity of the question, one would expect the answer to be equally enormous. A grand strategy. A transformation program. A 200-slide deck from McKinsey. A three-year roadmap. All the overthinking you can imagine. Brainiac work through and through.
Nope.
Ironically overthinking and waiting and “perfect” of course is the recipe for disaster.
The one thing that actually works is comically small and absurdly trivial: Two people. Some people. One room. A couple of laptops. Fiddling. Tinkering. Maybe building their first agent. Struggling, ups, downs.
It’s part of my job currently because I think one of the best things we can socially do and in socialising our talents is that. Sit with people, open a laptop, and start. No other agenda: let’s see what this thing can do for your actual work. No demo. No presentation. Nothing smart. Just work with actual “context”.
Let it roll, and things happen. Insights come flying. What the thing can do, what it can’t (yet?) do, what it means for the org, where the current org hits the limits of the new thing. Just like that. It’s not that hard.
Once agent runs and does funny, or productive, or awesome or trivial things, the same person who five minutes earlier said “I can’t do this” or “CLI - that’s not for me” watches their messy spreadsheet get analyzed (20$ of tokens but a forecast like no other in the last 12 months), backlog structured, meeting notes synthesized (but now everyday, all of them. Oops, a new productive habit). Something that would’ve taken them half a day, now swooshing down in seconds. After the second it’s not magic anymore. It’s the new normal, a level for their data, their context, their problem. And addictive. No turning back.
That second changes things. I’ve seen it dozens of times now. It’s the same face every time. A mix of “holy shit” and “wait, what else can this do?”
I had a call with 15 strategists (you know: strategy being an art and all), denying the new toy, showing them analyses the thing did in minutes and 15/15 wanting to apply it next week.
Pandora’s box
If that person is a team lead, the team changes. If that person is a CEO, the company changes.
What the Forst agent actually does is mostly irrelevant. It’s a switch of the mental model. The idea of what’s possible just changed trajectory. After that, it doesn’t come back down. Agents then mean agency.
Pandora’s box opening. For better or worse. Because not everything is easy now. The person with the new won agency now starts seeing the entire workflow with from a different vantage point. Every repetitive task, every weekly report, every data pull that took three hours or was depending on the availability of that expert that never has time. Boom, from pain point to candidate.
And the ones who don’t have that moment? They’re still debating whether AI is “ready” or “reliable” or “safe enough” and focusing what it can’t do” and how “its not human at all” and how the other bubble is just “without any responsibility". Which are valid questions. But they’re questions you can only answer by doing it. Not by reading about it. And then, maybe knowingly, still own that position, earned from practice.
We’re touching maybe 1-5% of what AI can do
That’s volume and areas. I’m guessing of course. The remaining 95-99% aren’t an about knowledge, they are mainly about not applying practice. They are waiting for a pioneer just doing it and being surprised that it actually works. my next big bet is middle and top management. All the heroics, all the dirty work, figuring out the signal in the noise. The whiter the collar, the ironically better the AI is in filtering. And the clearer our vanity in discussing wordings for week, while the AI still gets the same signal, becasue the information content remains the same. The weeks of discussion were about socially coding the thing. Tribal rituals.
The people I work with are all smart. Many of them are senior. They’ve read the articles. They’ve seen the demos. They know, intellectually, that AI is a big deal. But knowing and doing are two different planets. The gap between “I’ve seen a ChatGPT demo” and “I built an agent that checks my strategy docs against reality every morning” is enormous. And you can’t close it by reading more articles. The thing that makes the difference now is not IQ, but leaning into practice and knowing it’s a strategic move.
The responsible position
Those in positions to decide must open the windows for this. Not next quarter. Not after the “AI strategy” is finalized. Now. Rather under- than overthink. Just like 1995. Those who won built, they didn’t think that mich. That came later, in exploitation times.
CEOs: build programs that let your people practice. Not one-off workshops. Not a lunch-and-learn. Actual time, actual tools, actual problems. Rituals, habits. Weekly. The ROI will be obvious within weeks. And the ones who practice will tell you things about your business that no consultant will.
Schools: teach kids now. They’re already using it anyway. The question is whether they learn to use it well or whether they stumble into it unsupervised. That’s not a technology question. That’s an education question.
Universities: shift your curriculae. I talked to a professor recently who still teaches the same software engineering course from 2019. 2019. That’s seven years and an entirely different reality ago. Students deserve better. Now.
Parents: show it to your kids. Sit with them. Build something together. That’s the laptop-in-a-room thing again, just at the kitchen table. This is better than the toy robots. It’s a ton of fun next to the learning.
Not tomorrow. Now. Today, this evening. That’s not even rushing it, and I don’t talk FOMO!
The absurdity
It makes me laugh every time I think about it:
The strategic questions AI is putting at our feet are astronomical. We’re talking about the restructuring of work, of education, of how decisions flow through organizations, of what jobs look like in five years. These are society-level questions. The kind that usually require commissions, think tanks, policy papers.
And the best strategic response right now? Sit in a room. Open a laptop. Build something. Together. See what happens.
Absurdly tactical.