Six questions to test your AI strategy, from MIT Sloan
George Westerman of MIT Sloan lays out six questions for executives shaping an AI strategy; most of them probe how the company works rather than the technology it buys.
George Westerman, a senior lecturer in information technology at MIT Sloan School of Management and a digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, has published a six-question checklist for executives working out an AI strategy. He built it on case studies with Takeda, Ferrovial and Dentsu Creative, and MIT Sloan shared the piece, 6 Questions to Guide Your AI Strategy, on its Ideas Made to Matter site and its X account.
The starting point is an awkward statistic: between 70 and 95 percent of AI pilots never spread across the organization. Westerman's diagnosis: "The hard part is not the AI. You're not going to get any value from the technology unless you do business differently." Companies that earn a return on AI, he argues, do so because they change how they work.
The six questions
- What is your shared ambition? How do you want to do business differently, and what does that change bring your customers and your employees? Efficiency on its own does not count as an ambition.
- How will you govern your efforts? Set up governance as the force that pushes initiatives forward instead of a brake that slows them.
- How will you capture value as you scale AI? Value arrives when use spreads across the whole organization and executives stand behind it.
- Is your tech foundation solid? Clean data, good tools and integrated systems are the base of any strategy.
- Is your culture ready to move fast? That takes openness to experiments and to decisions driven by data rather than past habit.
- Do your people have the right skills? If the people who must carry the transformation feel threatened by it, or find the technology alien, the transformation fails.
The list gives its own weighting away: at least three of the six are culture questions, not technology questions.
