Business Strategy in the Age of AI: Structure First, Tech Second

When people talk about AI and business strategy, the conversation often jumps straight to tools.

“Which platform should we use?” “Can ChatGPT write our plan?” “What dashboards do we need?”

But - having been involved in strategic development for decades, I can tell you -

Strategy Needs More Than Good Intentions

I recently worked with a client in a highly complex environment: multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, sensitive mission needs, and a shifting technology landscape. Like many organisations, they had no shortage of ambition - but struggled to align their people, products, and delivery around clear, shared outcomes.

The way through was to apply a structured strategy framework:

• VMOST (Vision, Mission, Outcomes, Strategy, Tactics) gave us a disciplined way to link top-level intent to day-to-day activity.

• Swim lanes helped us break the business down into its component parts — People, Product, Technology, Delivery, Mission — so each had its own focus, but all connected back into the bigger picture.

• Strategic themes (digital transformation, toolset modernisation, AI enablement, staff and customer engagement - put simply 'people, tech, products, delivery, financial) provided the cross-cutting threads that tied everything together.

The result was a coherent, joined-up strategy the whole leadership team could stand behind and staff could use as their 'north star'.

Where AI Fits In

Once the strategy scaffolding is in place, AI becomes a genuine accelerator. It can:

• Synthesize insights: analysing market trends, competitor moves, or internal performance data to inform where strategy should focus.

• Stress-test assumptions: modelling different scenarios (“what if we doubled investment in X?”) far quicker than traditional methods.

• Spot misalignment: highlighting where activities in one swim lane drift away from the agreed outcomes in another.

• Support communication: turning strategy into clear, tailored narratives for different audiences (boards, teams, customers).

AI helps strategy move from being a static document to a living, adaptive framework.

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Use AI in Strategy

The wrong way is to start with the tools: feeding prompts into an AI platform and hoping it spits out a “strategy.” That’s not strategy - that’s a to-do list dressed up in buzzwords.

The right way is to:

1. Anchor your intent: be crystal clear on vision, mission, and outcomes.

2. Structure your thinking: frameworks like VMOST and swim lanes ensure alignment across the business.

3. Layer in AI: use it to accelerate insight, test options, and scale communication.

Only then does AI deliver real strategic value.

Why This Matters for SMEs

Large organisations have strategy functions, programme offices, and whole teams dedicated to alignment. SMEs often don’t. But SMEs can benefit most from this approach: clear frameworks, focused priorities, and AI-powered insight that saves both time and cost.

With the right structure, SMEs can punch above their weight - using AI not just to “keep up” but to get ahead.

At Talisman, we help organisations design strategy that sticks. From VMOST frameworks to swim lane planning, and from AI readiness to execution roadmaps, we make sure your strategy isn’t just written, it’s lived.

Because in the age of AI, the winners won’t be the ones who have the flashiest tools. They’ll be the ones who get the structure right first, and let AI scale it.