“We need to move faster on AI” has become the default response to competitive pressure. It sounds decisive. It sounds like leadership. But often, it’s anxiety wearing the costume of strategy.
In many organisations, speed is compensating for something else: a gap in judgement about where artificial intelligence actually helps.
When leaders aren’t sure where the value is, the instinct is to deploy everywhere — more tools, more pilots, more announcements.
A press release about the new AI initiative. A slide in the investor deck. A line in the annual report about “AI-driven efficiency”.
And activity happens. Meetings get scheduled, vendors get selected, budgets get approved. But underneath, something else is happening: use cases don’t stick.
Six months later, half the pilots have quietly disappeared, and nobody wants to be the one to say so out loud.
Enthusiasm fades by the second quarter. The early excitement of “look what this tool can do” gives way to the reality of “nobody actually changed how they work”.
Trust in the next transformation initiative quietly erodes.
Employees have seen this movie before: a bold announcement, a burst of energy and a slow fade into irrelevance. They’ve learned to nod along and wait it out.
Because there was no time to ask what problem this was actually solving. Nobody stopped to ask which three decisions, if made faster or better, would actually move the business.
Instead, the mandate was simply, “Go faster. Go everywhere.”
Hiding the gap
You can’t out-deploy a strategy gap. You can only hide it, temporarily and expensively.
Every unfocused pilot costs real money, real attention and real credibility. At best, it buys a few more months before the gap becomes visible again.
Real value comes from something less visible: a clear view of the decisions AI should influence and the ones it shouldn’t.
Some decisions benefit enormously from AI: pattern recognition across massive data sets, first drafts, scenario modelling.
Others don’t: decisions that require contextual judgement, human trust or ethical trade-offs still demand leadership.
Confusing the two is where most of the wasted speed comes from. It takes discipline to know where speed helps, and where it simply creates noise.
Speeding up a bad decision doesn’t make it a good one. It only means discovering you were wrong sooner, at greater cost. That requires space to think, not more tools to roll out.
Ironically, the organisations that create the most value from AI often look, from the outside, like they’re moving more slowly. They spend time deciding where to focus before they spend money deploying.
The organisations that will pull ahead won’t be the ones deploying AI the fastest. They’ll be the ones that are most deliberate about where AI actually changes the work.
Because speed without a clear thesis is fragile. And fragile adoption doesn’t survive the next budget cycle, the next leadership change, or the next quarter when someone finally asks: “So what did we actually get for this?”
Study in contrasts
Consider two organisations facing the same market pressure.
The first announces an AI-first mandate, sets an ambitious target for every team and every process within a year, and measures success by the breadth of the rollout. Eighteen months later, AI is everywhere, but the results are thin because nobody ever decided which handful of decisions mattered enough to redesign around it.
The second organisation moves more quietly. It identifies three or four decisions where the stakes are highest and the data is strongest, such as pricing, forecasting or risk assessment. It goes deep before it goes wide.
From the outside, in month three, it looks slower. By month eighteen, it has fewer AI headlines, but measurably better business outcomes where they matter most.
The lesson isn’t to move slowly for its own sake. It’s that speed only creates value once you know what you’re actually racing toward.
Arinya Talerngsri is Senior Vice President, Local Partner and Managing Director at BTS Thailand, part of the BTS Group, a leading global strategy implementation firm. She is passionate about revolutionising education and creating opportunities for Thais and people worldwide. Executives and organisations looking to collaborate or learn more about leadership and talent development, succession planning and organisational transformation can contact her at arinya.talerngsri@bts.com or visit her LinkedIn profile.
