How do you align AI strategy with business goals?

Working backwards from business objectives

Working backwards from business objectives means starting with the organisation’s strategic plan — its growth targets, its efficiency priorities, its risk appetite, its client experience goals. For each priority, the question is: what work currently slows progress towards this goal, where is human time and attention being spent on tasks that do not require human judgment, where are decisions being made with inadequate or delayed information? AI application candidates emerge from this analysis, rather than from a review of available AI tools. This approach produces a list of AI use cases that are intrinsically aligned with business goals — because they were identified by starting from those goals. The alternative approach — starting from AI tools and working forwards to find applications — consistently produces misaligned investments.

How to test whether an AI use case is strategically aligned

Testing strategic alignment is straightforward: can you draw a clear, direct line from the AI use case to a specific, named business objective? If an AI tool improves the speed of financial reporting, which business objective does that advance? If the answer is “it makes the finance team more efficient,” the next question is: how does that connect to a strategic priority — cost reduction, growth capacity, risk management? If the line of connection is clear and short, the use case is strategically aligned. If it requires multiple steps of inference to connect AI activity to business outcome, alignment is weak. Apply the same test to every candidate use case, and the alignment question becomes diagnostic: it surfaces which use cases are genuinely strategic and which are technology experiments dressed up as strategy.