Rethinking Corporate Strategy in the Age of AI

EY’s EMEIA Board Priorities 2025 report recommends that boards ensure the organization’s AI and digital strategy aligns with its corporate strategy. They advise management to outline AI readiness for today and tomorrow, and to assess whether new tools support the existing direction, or if rapid advances in AI warrant a strategic rethink.

This is a useful starting point. But in my view, it’s already behind the curve. Framing AI as something to “align” to an existing strategy risks missing its transformative potential. It’s a present-forward, incremental mindset.

Instead of bolting on an AI strategy, companies may build an AI-enabled corporate strategy from the ground up. Here are 5 approaches to consider:

🔁 1. Start Future-Back: Design scenarios in which AI reshapes your industry (e.g., autonomous finance, AI-led R&D, algorithmic regulation). Work backward to define how your business must compete in each future, and challenge your current strategic assumptions accordingly. This approach helps to identify potential opportunities that a present-forward view might miss.

🧠 2. Assess Dynamic Capabilities (Sense, Seize, Transform): Evaluate your organization’s ability to sense emerging AI shifts and ecosystem logic. Determine if you possess the agility to seize new opportunities and evolve business models. Assess your capacity to reorganize, retrain, and reallocate in response to AI-driven change.

⚔️ 3. Tension-Test Your Strategy: Examine the resilience of your strategy under various AI disruption scenarios. Consider the implications if a competitor open-sources a powerful model, if regulators impose strict algorithmic transparency requirements, or if a key supplier is acquired by an AI-native platform. This can reveal vulnerabilities and inform capabilities and contingency planning.

🧩 4. Map Strategic Differentiation in an AI World: Analyze how AI will impact your sources of competitive advantage. Will your customer insight pipeline become real-time and predictive? Can operations be optimized autonomously? How will products be personalized through AI? How will your workforce be augmented by cognitive tools and new teaming models? What will become commoditized, and what new moats can you build?

💡 5. Capture, Not Just Create, Value: Evaluate your ability to capture the economic value generated by AI innovation. Do you control the intellectual property, data assets, and complementary resources necessary to profit from AI? Or are you at risk of commoditization or displacement by dominant platforms? This clarifies the importance of control in the AI economy.

In short: AI could support your strategy, or reshape it altogether.
What other approaches have you found helpful for thinking about strategy in the age of AI?

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