Don’t Let Your AI Strategy Wander the Pasture
While others duct-tape LLMs to legacy systems, you need a shepherd to lead your AI team to greener pastures.
If you find yourself telling your engineering team to “just ship something with AI already,” you don’t have an AI strategy — and you’ve already lost.
This is like a shepherd moving her flock to a field and telling them, “Be good little sheep. I’ll be back in a week to move you to your next pasture.” No shepherd in her right mind would leave her flock unattended for a day, let alone a week.
Your AI team needs a shepherd too — someone who stays close, steers progress, wards off threats, and guides the herd to greener pastures.
We’ve seen the carnage of shepherdless herds before. During the last tech wave, companies spent millions digitizing paper processes — but many failed to realize meaningful productivity gains. Why? Because they didn’t reimagine workflows to take advantage of new cloud and mobile tech advancements, settling instead for glorified web forms.
Today, most companies are duct-taping LLMs and AI features onto legacy systems and calling it a strategy. It’s not. That’s like building a field services app that makes you upload photos from a separate digital camera, type detailed notes on a tiny keyboard, and manually enter the job location — about as efficient as herding sheep with a spreadsheet.
You need an intentional AI strategy — one that reimagines your experience from the ground up. Don’t ask, “Where do we bolt on AI?” Ask, “What’s now possible that wasn’t before?”
Your engineers may resist. They’ll ask, “Why build a new experience?” or “Why did we hire an AI strategist? I can add AI to our existing product in ten minutes.” Or, “Can’t we just display OpenAI’s output here?” A good shepherd knows when — and how — to fight off these wolves.
A great one ensures the team is guided by customer feedback — often multiple times a day.
To keep pace with upstarts and incumbents, forward-looking AI teams use tools like Replit and Claude Code to ship new products in weeks — not quarters. Your shepherd must lead a team that moves just as fast.
Don’t just ship something — anything — with AI. Find your shepherd, and lead them somewhere worth going.