Most "AI strategies" are vendor lists in disguise

We read a lot of AI strategy documents. Most of them are not strategies. They are procurement plans wearing a strategy's clothes — a tidy list of platforms to buy, vendors to evaluate, and licences to provision, with a budget line stapled to the back.

A shopping list is a fine thing to have. It is just not a strategy, and confusing the two is how organisations end up with eleven AI pilots, three overlapping copilots, and no measurable change to the business.

A strategy says what you will change. A vendor list says what you will buy. Only one of them survives contact with reality.

Three questions that separate the two

1. What gets worse if this works? Real strategy has a point of view about trade-offs. If automating a workflow is genuinely valuable, something downstream changes — headcount shifts, a team's remit narrows, a process you relied on disappears. A vendor list never mentions this because tools don't have consequences; decisions do. If your document can't name a single thing that gets harder, it isn't deciding anything.

2. Could a competitor copy it by buying the same software? If the entire plan is reproducible with a corporate card, there is no strategy in it — only spend. The defensible part is never the model or the platform, which everyone can rent. It is your data, your workflows, and the judgement encoded in how you deploy them. A strategy spends most of its words there. A vendor list spends most of its words on brand names.

3. What is the first thing you will stop doing? Strategy is subtraction. Every credible AI plan we've seen starts by killing candidate use cases, not collecting them — most ideas don't survive an honest ROI review, and saying so is the work. A document that only adds (more tools, more pilots, more platforms) has confused motion with progress.

The honest version is shorter

A real AI strategy fits on a couple of pages. It names the handful of places where AI earns its keep, the order you'll tackle them, the trade-offs you accept, and the one or two things you're explicitly not doing this year. The vendor list — what to actually buy — falls out of that, as an appendix. Not the other way around.

If your strategy reads like a catalogue, you don't have a strategy yet. You have a budget looking for a reason. The good news is that the fix is cheap: three weeks, a few honest conversations, and a willingness to cut.