Quick answer: AI strategy for CEOs is a leadership job, not an IT job and not a vendor job. The trap is not that IT fails you. The trap is that IT succeeds at exactly what it is built for, security, integration, governance, and containment, and in doing so it kills AI as a force multiplier. So stop asking your team for an "AI strategy." Ask instead for a leverage map: a clear picture of where multiplying force would actually change how your business operates. Start with one question. Where does leverage actually compound here?
By Andreas Pettersson, founder of Leaders ADAPT and a former Canon AI executive who built and sold an AI company before ChatGPT existed.
Let me be direct. Most CEOs I talk to have already delegated their AI strategy. They just will not say it out loud.
They handed it to IT. Or to a consultant. Then they waited for a plan to come back. And what came back looked responsible. A vendor shortlist. Then a governance policy. And a pilot running somewhere safe. Everyone felt good about it.
Here is the problem. You do not have an AI strategy. You have a containment plan. And those are opposites.
I have stood on both sides of this. When I was running Arcules, we built real machine learning and computer vision at scale, before ChatGPT made any of this a dinner-table topic. We hired PhDs. We processed petabytes of training data every month. Then I watched the market commoditize the exact thing we had built from scratch. So here is what that taught me. The advantage was never the technology, because the technology gets cheap. The advantage was judgment about where to point it. That part never commoditizes, and that judgment is what AI strategy for CEOs really comes down to.
Why AI strategy for CEOs is a leadership call, not an IT job
Because AI is not a technology decision. Instead, it is a decision about where to multiply force in your business.
That sounds like a slogan. It isn't. It is the whole thing. Think about what AI actually is at your level. It is a force multiplier. One unit of force in, ten units out. A lever. And like any lever, it amplifies whatever it touches. Point it at a strong process and you get a much stronger one. Aim it at a broken one and you scale the brokenness. Send it to the wrong corner of the business and you get a faster version of nothing.
So the real work is not technical. Instead, the real work is placement. Where do you put the lever? And just as important, what do you choose not to multiply yet? That is a CEO decision, because it cuts across functions. It touches your margins, your people, and your competitive position. No IT department can make that call, because none is accountable for the whole business. You are.
Why delegating AI strategy for CEOs backfires
Now, here is what happens when you delegate it anyway. You hand AI to a function that is brilliant at its actual job. IT is built to secure, integrate, govern, and contain. So that is what it does. And containment is the exact opposite of multiplication.
The trap is not that IT fails. Rather, the trap is that IT succeeds at exactly what it was designed to do, and ruins AI for you as a force multiplier.
Read that twice, because it is the part almost everyone misses. You are not waiting on a failure. Instead, you are getting a success at the wrong objective. Twelve months later you have an approved vendor list, a policy document, and a pilot in accounts payable. Technically, you are "using AI." Yet nothing has multiplied. No margin change. No speed change. Nothing you can explain when the board follows up.
So you do not have a technology problem. You have a leadership problem. And the data agrees. RAND found that more than 80% of AI projects fail, about twice the rate of regular IT projects. Meanwhile, S&P Global reported that the share of companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives jumped from 17% in 2024 to 42% in 2025. Those are not model failures. Those are placement failures, and placement is exactly what AI strategy for CEOs is about.
The IT delegation trap, and what it actually costs
Let me tell you the story that makes this concrete, because it shows what AI strategy for CEOs looks like under pressure. It is not an AI story. Actually, it is older than that.
In the late 1990s, two companies looked at the internet. One was Borders. Over a thousand bookstores. Decades of history. Real scale. The other was Amazon, a startup that did not exist yet at that scale.
Borders treated the internet as a technology to manage. So they did the responsible thing. They delegated their online strategy. They ran pilots. Then they waited to understand it before they committed. Carefully, they asked the safe questions, the ones a prudent operator asks. Vendor security. Integration timelines. Return on investment. And in 2001 they made the decision that looked the most reasonable of all. They outsourced their entire online business to Amazon. Why build it when someone else can run it better?
Within a decade, Borders was gone.
Why careful companies still lose
Here is the thing. Borders did not fail because they were careless. They failed because they were careful. They were prudent. And they were disciplined. However, they applied all of that discipline to the wrong frame. They asked, how do we manage this technology safely? Amazon's leadership, by contrast, asked a completely different question. Where does speed compound? Where does reach multiply? And where does learning accelerate?
Same internet. Same era. The same technology available to everyone. Yet different placement, and therefore a different outcome.
That is the IT delegation trap in one example. Borders handed a force multiplier to the part of the org that manages technology, and that part managed it, beautifully, right out of relevance. Reasons aren't results. Borders had every reason. Amazon got the result. Right now you are making the Borders decision or the Amazon decision, and the Borders one feels safer every time. That is exactly why most leaders get it wrong, and why AI strategy for CEOs has to start at the top.
Stop asking for an "AI strategy." Demand a leverage map
So what do you do instead? You change what you ask for, and that shift is where real AI strategy for CEOs begins.
The next time someone hands you an "AI strategy," push it back. You are not asking for an AI strategy. You are asking for a leverage map. Not a vendor list. Not a policy. And not a slide about adoption metrics. Instead, a map of where multiplying force would actually change how the business operates. Not where can we use AI. Not what is easy to automate. And not which vendor has the best demo. Those are the wrong questions, because they produce policy documents instead of leverage.
The right question, the one that opens the whole thing, is this.
Where does leverage actually compound here?
Ask that first. Always. Before anyone mentions a tool, a model, or a vendor. It does most of the work, because it forces the conversation onto outcomes instead of activity. A bottleneck that, if you broke it, would speed up everything downstream. A decision your team makes a hundred times a week where being faster and sharper would compound across the whole system. That is leverage. That is where the lever goes.
The question almost nobody asks
Then ask the question almost nobody asks. What must not be multiplied yet? Where would pointing AI right now actually make things worse, given your culture, your trust levels, and your incentives as they are today? Because a force multiplier amplifies weakness just as fast as strength. So restraint is not caution. Restraint is the strategy. The CEOs who win are not the fastest. Rather, they are the most deliberate about what they leave untouched.
When you have those two answers, you have something a containment plan can never give you. You have a leverage map. And it is yours, because only you can see the whole board. That is the heart of AI strategy for CEOs, and it cannot be outsourced.
How AI strategy for CEOs differs from hiring consultants
Fair question. Once leaders realize this is their job, the instinct is to hire it out. Get AI strategy consulting for CEOs and senior teams. Let the firm tell you where the leverage is.
Be careful here. Use a consultant the way you would use a good analyst, to inform your judgment, but never to replace it. The moment you let an outside party define your AI problem, you stop being the captain of your ship and become cargo on someone else's route. They frame the problem in terms of what they can sell or staff. That is not malice. Instead, that is gravity. Every firm bends your strategy toward its own offering.
So the placement judgment cannot be delegated, because the accountability cannot be delegated. A consultant walks away after the engagement. You, however, live with the result for years. Therefore bring in expertise for the parts that are genuinely technical, and keep the leverage map in your own hands. You can rent the building. You cannot rent the deciding.
What owning your AI strategy for CEOs looks like this quarter
You do not need a transformation program. Instead, you need to take the map back, because owning your AI strategy for CEOs starts there.
So sit your leadership team down. Do not say the word AI. Ask three questions. Where would multiplying force change our outcomes? What must we not multiply yet? And what decision would this let us revisit faster? Write down what you hear. That is the start of your leverage map, built by you, not by a vendor.
Then pick one point on that map, the single place where breaking a bottleneck would compound the most. Name the outcome in plain words with a number attached. Put one person in charge of it, not a committee. Give it a few weeks, not a roadmap. Then look at the result honestly and decide to expand it or kill it.
That is the whole motion. One leverage point. One owner. Then one short loop. Finally, one honest review. Do that, and you are leading AI instead of containing it.
The CEOs who win at AI are not the most technical people in the room. Rather, they are the ones who refuse to delegate the thinking. That refusal is the whole of AI strategy for CEOs. Decide first. The rest follows.
Where to go next
Want to go deeper on AI strategy for CEOs? For the full picture of leading AI without being technical, start with the hub, AI for CEOs. And for the practical playbook of running it week to week, read The AI Playbook for CEOs.
If you want to make these decisions in a room of CEOs facing the same calls, that is what the AI Executive Mastermind is built for. And if you want the IT delegation trap, the leverage map, and the full framework in one place, it is all in the book, AI Leadership Mastermind.
Your one move this week: stop waiting for an AI strategy to come back from someone else. Instead, ask your team where leverage actually compounds, and start drawing the map yourself.
Join the AI Executive Mastermind | Get the book
Frequently asked questions about AI strategy for CEOs
Is AI strategy a CEO responsibility or an IT responsibility?
AI strategy for CEOs is a CEO responsibility, not an IT one. AI is not a technology decision, it is a decision about where to multiply force in the business, and that cuts across functions, margins, people, and competitive position. IT is built to secure, integrate, and govern technology, which is essential but the opposite of multiplying it. So if you delegate AI strategy to IT, you do not get a strategy. You get a containment plan.
What is a leverage map?
A leverage map is what you should demand instead of an AI strategy. It is a picture of where multiplying force would actually change how your business operates: which bottlenecks, if broken, would speed up everything downstream, and which frequent decisions would compound if they got faster and sharper. It starts with one question, where does leverage actually compound here, asked before anyone names a tool or a vendor.
Why do most AI initiatives fail?
Not because the technology is weak. RAND found more than 80% of AI projects fail, about twice the rate of regular IT projects, and S&P Global reported companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives rose from 17% in 2024 to 42% in 2025. In addition, an MIT study found 95% of AI initiatives fail to turn a profit while 5% see rapid revenue and profit acceleration with the same tools. So the gap is leadership and judgment about placement, not the technology.
Should a CEO hire AI strategy consultants?
Use them to inform your judgment, not to replace it. The moment you let an outside firm define your AI problem, you become cargo on someone else's route, because every firm bends the strategy toward what it can sell or staff. So bring in outside expertise for the genuinely technical parts, and keep the placement judgment, the leverage map itself, in your own hands. You are the one accountable for the result years from now.
Sources
- MIT, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025
- RAND, The Root Causes of Failure for AI Projects
- S&P Global Market Intelligence, Generative AI shows rapid growth but yields mixed results
