People who call themselves AI strategists keep turning up in your feed. Another owner at the association dinner mentions their AI strategy.
When it feels like everyone expects you to have one, the reflex is to go get one.
Before you do, look at what you'd be building it on. If you know where the business is going and what has to happen to get there, you're in a good position to work out where AI is worth spending money on. If you don't, AI can do so much that it's hard to know where to point it.
Every piece of software you've bought came with its job already decided. Your scheduling software was built to schedule, and your accounting software to keep the books. All you had to judge was whether it did that job better than what you had.
AI comes with no job at all. It'll take a crack at almost any work that runs on words or numbers, and it's better at some than others. It can clean up the wording on a quote, or answer the phone after hours and book the call. It can also read through years of job notes and tell you which kinds of work keep running over. Some owners are trying to hand it most of the office, first call to final invoice.
With that much range and nothing to aim it, there are two easy mistakes. One is putting AI everywhere it fits. Each piece works, but none of it adds up to a better business. The other is rebuilding the business around what AI can do. What it can do keeps changing, so you'd be rebuilding again and again.
Either way, the technology ends up deciding where your money and your crew's time go. That should be your call.
To make that call, you need objectives: the specific things that have to happen to get the business where you want it. If the strategy is a business that runs without you, one objective is getting you off the phone after supper by next quarter. If the strategy is winning more commercial work, one objective is getting bids out faster than the shops you're up against. Both are specific enough that you can look at something AI does and say whether it helps.
An AI strategy should mirror the business strategy, matching what AI can do to the objectives you've already set. Getting off the phone after supper? AI can answer after hours and book the call. You can put a price on that, and you'll know soon enough if it's working.
THE VERDICT
The AI strategy can wait until your objectives are clear. Before then, it ends up aimed at everything.
Once they are, find where AI moves them further than anything else would.