Everyone has AI tools, nobody has an AI strategy

The board wants to be 'AI first'. Two floors down, twelve departments are indeed doing something with AI; twelve different things.

Marketing writes copy with one tool, sales has put a chatbot on the website, customer service runs a mail assistant, and someone in finance is handy with Copilot. Twelve subscriptions, twelve logins, twelve copies of the same company information.

Those copies drift apart. Of course they do.

And here is what you get: the chatbot promises delivery within two days, the mail assistant writes five working days, and the website still shows last quarter's price. Three tools, three answers, and a customer who walks away.

That is not an AI strategy, those are twelve pilots that happen to run at the same time.

What is missing is not the thirteenth tool. What is missing is memory.

One memory

All those tools need exactly the same thing: solid knowledge of the business. That is where a strategy starts.

One memory, call it a knowledge base, as the foundation for all AI. Everything the company knows goes in: products, pricing agreements, procedures, frequently asked questions, tone of voice, and what went wrong last year. Connected to the systems that already hold the live data: the PIM, the calendar, the booking system, the inventory.

Then all sorts of things hang off the front of it:

• that same chatbot, but one that knows whether something is in stock
• marketing copy that matches the actual specifications
• emails with the right delivery time in them
• the background for the questions that really matter: a price proposal, a quarterly analysis, next year's business case

Four applications, one source.

And no, a memory like that is not built in an afternoon. Take a wholesaler with a few thousand items: the specifications sit in the ERP, photos and copy in a folder on the server, current lead times in the head of the buyer, and the agreements with major accounts in a spreadsheet managed by one commercial manager. Four places, four truths. Sorting that out is the real work. Hanging AI off it afterwards is the easy part.

So the question in the boardroom is not which tool to add. The question is where the memory sits that all those tools draw their information from.

Twelve departments with twelve tools is not a strategy. Twelve departments with one memory is.