Stop Planning AI Like It's 2024: The Case for Quarterly Strategy Reviews

I'll say this until I'm blue in the face: use cases are not a strategy.

If you're like most organizations, you spent 2024 building a long list of ways you want to use AI. You experimented, piloted tried things out. That was fantastic for 2024—but that approach won’t cut it in 2025. 

Strategy is a set of integrated choices that position your organization to win in whatever way your organization defines winning. It's deciding where you're going to play and how you're going to win.

So if your AI initiatives are sitting there delivering efficiency and productivity gains, that's great. But how is it positioning you to win? Are there other applications of AI that could give you greater possibilities of success? Unless we look beyond the very good gains from efficiency and productivity, you're not going to win with AI.

The Three Levels of AI Investment

In our upcoming book, Katia Walsh and I identify three types of AI priorities that every organization needs to consider:

1️⃣ Enterprise-wide exposure is foundational. Most organizations still don't give their people access to basic AI tools, or if they do, it's limited to a minimal number of people with restricted use cases. To get the best return on investment, you need enterprise-wide access to AI with full training—safe, secure, simple ways for everyone to use basic AI like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot.

2️⃣ Departmental tools are the no-brainers. Marketing teams using content generation tools like Jasper that understand your brand voice. Developers using GitHub Copilot for coding. These tools are specific to the needs of each department, deliver clear efficiency gains, and are easy to justify from an investment perspective.

3️⃣ Strategic applications help you move the needle significantly. These use AI in ways that will have a big impact on your ability to perform in the marketplace and win. They're bigger and more complicated, go across departmental silos, and require an enterprise perspective. This is where you're truly reinventing your organization.

It's crucial to think about AI in these three levels because if you don't, they get mushed together. You start thinking AI is all about basic access or departmental tools, missing the strategic applications that can transform your business.

The Value Portfolio Approach

We call this a "value portfolio" because your investment in AI will shift over time across three ways to create value:

👉 Efficiency: Using AI to be more productive and streamline operations.

👉 Engagement: Leveraging AI to interact with customers and employees in new ways, driving deep personalization.

👉 Reinvention: Looking at your existing business and asking how you can do things differently because you now have these capabilities.

All three areas can be game changers if you take the perspective that they will transform your business. It's not just reinvention that's transformative—having more efficiency or engaging customers in new ways can be highly strategic and impactful too.

But here's the key: your focus will shift over time. In Q1, you might focus heavily on efficiency with some experimentation in engagement and reinvention. Six quarters later, you'll probably have achieved many efficiency gains and will focus much more on engagement and reinvention.

Why 2024’s Annual Planning Approach Fails for AI in 2025

Here’s what most organizations did in 2024: they tried to apply traditional strategic planning to AI. But that doesn't work because there are too many unknowns. We don't know exactly how AI will evolve, what new technologies will emerge, or how quickly our organizations will adapt their practices and culture.

Sometimes we stumble forward, sometimes we jerk away—adoption is very uneven. But there's also a tipping point where organizations suddenly accelerate their AI adoption because they realize its tremendous value and their culture shifts to embrace it faster.

2024-style strategy planning doesn't like unknowns. We typically want to plan for the year and execute against that plan, measuring success by how accurately we anticipated each quarter's goals and hit them.

That approach won't work with AI in 2025. You need a plan you can follow, but that plan needs to be written in pencil because you'll probably need to change it at the end of each quarter.

The Six-Quarter Walk: 2025’s Answer to AI Strategy

Instead of 2024’s annual planning approach, AI strategy in 2025 requires what I call a "six-quarter walk"—planning 18 months out with the flexibility to adjust every quarter.

Each quarter, define the impact AI will have in helping you win:

• Q1: We'll deliver this specific value

• Q2: We'll have these new capabilities

• Q3–Q6: Continuing to build toward our vision

This approach makes AI's impact real and tangible rather than mysterious. Until we can demystify what AI does for us—until we understand our strategy and the choices we're making about what we will and won't do to achieve our business goals—we're just asking, "What can AI do?" instead of "How can we use AI to accomplish what we want to achieve?"

For this to work, every person in your organization should be able to answer three questions:

1. What future are we trying to build together?

2. What is our strategy to get from today to that tomorrow?

3. What is my role and responsibility in making that strategy successful?

If everyone on your leadership team can answer these similarly, you're off to a great start. Make it your objective to ensure that everyone in your organization can answer these three questions.

Implementing Quarterly Reviews (Not Annual Ones)

Agile AI strategy requires moving beyond 2024’s annual reviews to quarterly assessments. The quarterly review process has two phases:

1️⃣ Preparation involves continuously tracking progress throughout the quarter, gathering feedback from people affected by AI initiatives, and scanning the landscape for new technologies, competitor moves, and changing customer expectations.

2️⃣ The Review Meeting covers celebrating progress, raising challenges, identifying resource gaps, and refining the roadmap for the next six quarters (adding another quarter to keep it a rolling 18-month plan). This should be more adjustment than wholesale rethinking since your strategic goals remain fixed.

The beauty of this approach is that it creates transparency, breaks down silos, ensures everyone has a voice, and maintains discipline around high-value initiatives while allowing for necessary adjustments.

The Path Forward

We live in an era where competitive analysis that used to take weeks can now be done in hours. The tools for gathering information and understanding the landscape are more powerful than ever. Yet many organizations are still trying to plan AI strategy on annual cycles that were designed for a slower-moving world.

The change feels like it's happening super fast, but it actually happens slowly over the long term. With AI, our world will look completely different in a few years, and the organizations that thrive will be those that adapt their planning processes to match the speed of change.

Annual planning for your overall business? Sure, keep doing that to set strategic goals. But for AI strategy specifically, you need quarterly reviews and constant adjustment. Your strategy must evolve as quickly as the technology and your organization's ability to adapt.

The winners in 2025 won't be those with the longest list of use cases. They'll be the organizations that make integrated strategic choices about how AI will position them to create value and win—and remain agile enough to adjust those choices as the landscape evolves.

Stop planning AI like it’s 2024. The six-quarter walk starts now.

💭 Your Turn 

How is your organization approaching AI strategy planning? Are you still using annual cycles, or have you moved to more agile approaches?

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What I Can’t Stop Talking About 

• AI won't make us dumb and lazy—but only if we're intentional about it. The counterintuitive truth: critical thinking becomes even more valuable as AI advances. The most successful leaders won't be those who rely on AI for answers, but those who leverage it to deepen their questions and sharpen their strategic thinking.

• If you’re not shouting about your AI successes, you’re failing. I see brilliant organizations creating incredible value with AI, but they're not communicating what they're doing internally or externally. If no one knows the value you're creating, it effectively doesn't exist.

My Upcoming Appearances

• Jun 10: Betterworks Webinar “The AI-Enabled HR Leader”, Virtual

• Aug 29: Indy SHRM Annual Conference Keynote, Indianapolis, IN

• Oct 15: Executive Women's Forum, Keynote, Chicago, IL

• Nov 13: Brilliance 2025, Celebrating Women Disrupting Healthcare Keynote, Chicago, IL

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