“We need an AI strategy.”
This is an urgent request we’ve been hearing a lot lately. AI is the buzzword of the decade, and the growing fear-of-missing-out is driving businesses to seek external "experts" to map out their future.
Digging deeper into these discussions, we’ve come to a surprising conclusion: most companies don’t actually need a consultant to develop their AI strategy.
The ability to build a real, actionable AI strategy is already sitting on your desktop. What most companies are missing isn't expertise. It's just a starting point.
AI is already capable of building the strategy. Whether ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, these large language models (LLMs) have a vast understanding of business frameworks, industry benchmarks, and technological capabilities.
Instead of paying a consultant to spend weeks "learning your business," AI can learn it much faster with the right prompting.
For example, take a manufacturing company with $30 million in revenue that produces garden tools for distribution to Ace Hardware and Home Depot. They can prompt AI with something like the following:
"We are a US-based manufacturer of garden tools with $30M in revenue. We distribute to Ace Hardware and Home Depot. Help us create a framework for an AI strategy. Use cases, employee training, and maintaining company security are important to us. What are some high-impact use cases? How can we use tools like Claude or Copilot today? Prioritize these by ease of implementation. To help create a thorough strategy, give us ideas of things we may be missing based on this initial prompt."
In seconds, AI will return a summarized starting point that is often as good as (if not better than) the initial "discovery" deck a consulting firm would charge thousands for.
Tip: Using deep research or thinking mode within the LLM will typically generate more informed results.
The power of doing this yourself doesn't stop at a list of ideas. AI can help frame the entire operational structure of the strategy. It can:
The key here is learning how to give AI the right context to get the specific answers needed. Master the prompt to bypass the middleman.
Here’s the reality: The consultants hired to write an AI strategy will likely use AI to do the heavy lifting. They’ll feed company data into a model, ask it for industry trends and other insights, and use it to draft the presentation. Why pay a premium for someone else to use a tool that’s already sitting on your desktop?
This isn't to say consultants are obsolete. There’s still a massive gap between having a strategy and executing it. Where external help becomes truly valuable is in the implementation and rollout.
AI can tell you what to do, but a human partner can help you navigate the cultural shift, integrate AI into specific legacy software, and manage the complex change management required to get 300 employees to use AI to their advantage.
Companies that establish the initial AI strategy before implementation typically have a better understanding of how to use AI and a stronger sense of ownership in the strategy. Consultants can help refine the strategy if needed, but for the strategy itself? Save the budget. Open a chat window, describe your business, and start building your own future.
At Trenegy, we help organizations ensure AI initiatives move from strategy to execution with the right technology, governance, and change management. To chat more about our approach, email info@trenegy.com.
Trenegy is a non-traditional consulting firm based in Houston, Texas.
