Disconnected Strategy Is a Liability - AI is About to Expose It
Every company has a strategy.
Every team does work.
The space in between? That’s where most of the pain lives.
In theory, planning guides execution.
In reality, it’s a mess of tools, timelines, bottlenecks, and stale documents.Strategy gets stuck. Execution drifts. Alignment breaks.We patch the cracks with slide decks, dashboards, and heroics.
AI didn’t create this gap. But it’s about to make it a competitive fault line.
The companies that close this gap—by building connected, adaptive, and learning operating models—will rapidly pull away. Everyone else will burn time, money, and talent just trying to keep up.
This isn’t a story about replacing people. It’s about removing friction, amplifying intelligence, and moving at the speed the market now demands.
That’s the real shift happening. And it’s already underway.
You don’t need another framework.
- You need fewer blockers between decisions and action.
- You need systems that learn, not just store.
- You need planning that gets smarter as the quarter unfolds—not more brittle.
- And you need to move before the cost of staying still becomes irrecoverable.
Here’s what’s really going on beneath the surface—and why the companies that respond now will gain a lead that’s hard to catch.
1. Everyone is tired of transformation. But change has never moved this fast.
Walk into any boardroom. Mention "transformation" and watch people's eyes glaze over.
Agile transformation. Digital transformation. Cultural transformation.
Exhausted.
I get it. I really do.
But here's the thing. Business is changing faster and more deeply than ever before. Technology that used to evolve over decades now shifts in months. Customer expectations reset overnight.
AI isn't just changing how we work. It's changing who wins and who loses.
JPMorgan Chase figured this out. They went from 450 AI experiments to over 1,000 production systems in two years. Their COiN system alone saves 360,000 hours annually. Result? $1.5 billion in business value. While their competitors debated transformation frameworks, JPMorgan built change into their DNA. And this is just scratching the surface of what's ahead.
Small moves. Quick responses. Constant adaptation.
Here in July of 2025, I would suggest that standing still is the riskiest move of all.
2. Human glue is expensive, boring, and it's too slow.
Most companies actually have good systems. Strategic planning processes. OKR frameworks. Project management tools.
The problem?
Everything depends on people and static tooling to manually connect the dots. Once connected it goes stale until the next big planning push.
Sarah in strategy spends 40% of her time updating PowerPoint decks. Mike in operations burns three days every month translating strategic priorities into team goals. Jennifer in finance spends entire weeks reconciling budgets with strategic initiatives.
Calculate the fully-loaded cost of this work. You're spending hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—on activities that AI agents could handle in minutes and the memory and learnings are lost in docs and spreadsheets over time.
Worse than the cost is the speed. Strategic pivots that should happen in days take weeks. Because everything flows through human bottlenecks.
The solution isn't replacing people. It's augmenting them.
Let agents handle data connections. Pattern recognition. Routine coordination. Let humans focus on interpretation. Relationships. Nuanced decisions.
JPMorgan's 200,000 employees now use their AI assistant for strategic decisions. The bank doesn't eliminate human judgment. They accelerate it.
The companies that master humans working with intelligent agents with access to organizational context will operate at speeds their competitors can't match.
3. You have tons of data. But it's not connected.
Every leader knows data is valuable. You've built data lakes. Hired analysts. Created dashboards for everything.
The raw material is there.
But here's what's missing. The data about how strategy, markets, execution, and capabilities fit together is disconnected. You can tell me your customer acquisition cost down to the penny. But you can't easily trace how a strategic bet on a new market is actually performing across your entire value chain.
Big data made big promises. Most weren't delivered.
Why?
Because we focused on volume instead of relationships.
The companies winning today aren't the ones with the most data. They're the ones that understand how their data connects.
That's why every major platform is desperately adding graph capabilities to their products.
4. Graphs help you find things. But living knowledge creates learning.
Knowledge graphs make search better. That's useful.
But the real power goes deeper. A living knowledge system captures not just what you know. It captures how you learn.
Most organizations are terrible at memory. They repeat the same strategic mistakes because the context around decisions lives in people's heads and the connections from strategic intent to results are not closed and evaluated in a timely manner. When those people leave, the learning goes with them.
Think about it.
How many times has your company made the same strategic mistake twice? Three times?
Organizations that build living knowledge systems don't just connect their data. They connect their decision patterns. Their learning loops. Their strategic reasoning.
They become learning organizations.
Not just aspirationally.
Actually.
5. You Don’t Have a Digital Model of How Your Business Actually Works
Here's the uncomfortable truth. There's no digital reference model for how your organization actually works.
It's all trapped in documents. Spreadsheets. People's heads.
No one knows how the sausage is made.
Your annual plan? Stale two weeks after it's published. Your quarterly reviews? Based on outdated assumptions. Your strategic initiatives? Disconnected from operational reality.
This isn't bias. It's blindness.
You're making strategic decisions based on outdated information because you have no systematic way to capture how decisions actually play out. What worked. What didn't. Why.
AI agents can change this. They can create the first living model of how your organization actually works.
Newman's Own proves this works. Their 50-person team now competes with multinational conglomerates. How? CEO David Best uses conversational AI for strategic decisions daily. The system saves 120 hours monthly while tripling marketing campaigns. But the real magic isn't efficiency. It's intelligence.
When David asks about market positioning, the system doesn't just surface data. It surfaces the specific conditions that led to past successes. The market signals that mattered. The assumptions that proved right.
More importantly, it identifies when current conditions are similar or different. Enabling faster, more informed decisions.
When the marketing team requests budget shifts, the system understands the pattern of how similar moves played out historically. What resources were actually required versus planned. What unintended consequences emerged.
This isn't about preserving old decisions. It's about learning from them systematically.
Organizations that embrace conversational complexity will gain dramatic advantages. While competitors struggle with outdated planning documents, they'll have intelligent conversations with living organizational models.
Making faster decisions. Based on deeper insights. Building learning loops that compound over time.
The companies that figure this out will win.
Strategy to execution works in every organization.
But it's fragmented. Messy. Expensive. Slow.
The organizations that build adaptive operating models powered by AI will see dramatic competitive advantages. While others burn cycles on coordination overhead, they'll be iterating on strategy and execution in real-time.
The tools exist today. Start simple. Pick one strategic initiative that's currently stuck in coordination hell. Map the human handoffs. Identify where agents could connect the dots automatically. Build from there.
The first companies to make planning truly connected to market signals will create insurmountable advantages. The litmus test is simple: Two months into any quarter, your plans should be more intelligent than when you started. Not staler. Smarter. When that happens, you'll know you've cracked the code.
References
- JPMorgan Chase digital transformation and AI implementation: Constellation Research
- JPMorgan Chase Gen AI use cases and lessons learned: Tearsheet
- JPMorgan Chase AI adoption leadership: CIO Dive
- Newman's Own Microsoft 365 Copilot case study: Microsoft Customer Stories
- Real-world AI business transformations: Microsoft Blogs