So, the IT Person Got Asked for an AI Strategy. Now What?

Picture this. Someone in leadership turns to the IT person and says, "Right, what's our AI strategy then?" And the IT person, bless them, reaches for the classic consultant line: "Well, first we need to look at the business's pain points."

Noble instinct. Wrong starting point.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the IT person does not know the business's pain points, not really. They know the system outages, the clunky integrations, the ticket backlog. They do not know that the finance team spends three days a month reconciling spreadsheets by hand, or that sales keeps losing deals because nobody follows up fast enough. Those pains live with the people doing the work: operations, finance, sales, the leadership team. The most important consideration is the business problem you're trying to solve, and that starts with a senior, cross functional conversation, not a solo mission from IT.

So what's left for the IT person to actually do? Quite a lot, as it happens, just not "diagnose the business." Their real job is twofold:

1.      Spot where technology can genuinely be switched on. 

Not "can we bolt AI onto this," but "is this process even ready for automation, or is it held together with duct tape and tribal knowledge?" Plenty of so-called technology problems are actually process problems wearing a technical disguise, and no amount of AI fixes a process nobody has documented.

2.      Act as the sense check on whether AI is even the right tool. 

This is the bit people skip because AI is having a moment and everyone wants in. But jumping straight to the tool before the problem is how projects quietly die six months later. Real problems have pain, cost, clarity, and a measurable improvement attached to them; if the team can't describe the problem in one sentence, it's not ready for an AI solution yet. Industry research backs this up too: a lack of clear strategy is consistently one of the top barriers organisations report when AI initiatives stall.

So the practical move for the IT person isn't to pretend they're suddenly fluent in every department's frustrations. It's to set up the room where that conversation can happen properly: an internal AI working group, pulling in operations, finance, a couple of willing leaders, and IT itself. Not a committee that meets quarterly and produces a slide nobody reads, a genuine forum where business pain gets named out loud, IT translates "is this technically feasible and worth doing," and someone keeps score on what's actually getting built versus just discussed.

And here's the bit worth saying plainly: nobody expects IT to carry this alone. Leaning on outside support, whether that's a specialist partner, a vendor with pattern recognition across similar businesses, or just a well run advisory relationship, is not an admission of defeat. It's how the "business first, technology second" approach actually gets delivered without everyone reinventing the wheel from scratch. Plenty of digital transformation attempts fail precisely because they treat technology as a shopping spree rather than a multiplier applied to a real, chosen problem.

The short version: don't ask IT to find the pain points. Ask IT to build the bridge, assess the fit, and bring in help when the problem is bigger than one department's bandwidth. That's a strategy. The spreadsheet of buzzwords is not.