Aligning Strategy, Technology and Market Growth – with AI

Digital transformations are about business reinvention. Success requires aligned leadership, cultural adaptation, implementable strategy and continual evolution. Disconnects between functional leaders (e.g., CFOs, CIOs and CMOs) and their consultants, systems integrators and agencies are a key reason digital transformations fail.

Often, we find organizations are unable to quickly launch new sites or digital products required for growth and prioritized as urgent by leadership. Their content supply chain is bottlenecked and incapable of supporting personalized content experiences. And their customer data is unusable, despite years of marketing technology investment.

If only there were a magic cure that could turn back time and ensure strategies are implementable, digital technologies flexible and campaigns effective – and able to drive growth at scale.

Strategies created by management consultants with little to no digital program implementation experience yield “pie in the sky” roadmaps. Digital ecosystems implemented by global systems integrators and shaped by outdated IT principles deliver monolithic technologies that make business stakeholders dependent on vendor-certified consultants. Go-to-market (GTM) campaigns deployed by marketing specialists can only be launched by using non-enterprise MarTech (aka “shadow tech”) that circumvents blockers.

Many organizations struggling to execute are increasingly self-aware that misalignment and lack of integration among strategy, technology and marketing have left them with what developers call “a ball of mud” – a mess of an operating model that is hard to understand, difficult to maintain or evolve and resistant to change.

Disconnects between functional leaders and consultants, systems integrators and agencies are one reason digital transformations fail.

Can AI magically address dysfunction? Could a team of purpose-built AI agents – working independently – possess sufficient specialized knowledge to successfully develop implementable strategies, flexible digital platforms and winning GTM campaigns?

Sadly, no. AI will not be a miracle cure – particularly if it is divorced from people, culture and processes.

That said, AI-enabled and integrated strategy, technology and marketing will deliver business reinvention outcomes and will help course-correct transformations that have gone awry.

According to IDC, $3.9 trillion will be spent on digital transformation by 2027. Now is an opportune time to utilize AI – along with the right team of associates and consultants – to align and AI-enable key aspects of digital strategy, technology and marketing so four key issues are addressed:

1. Lack of leadership support

2. Ineffective cross-functional governance

3. Stakeholders not “on the same page”

4. Expanding scope rather than narrowing the focus

Instead of following a traditional management consulting approach, AI-enabled organizations can shorten expensive multi-month strategy projects into mere days. The time savings come from AI-facilitated techniques including: systematically conducting competitive analysis; ingesting stakeholder feedback and other relevant inputs into large language models; and leveraging synthetic users (artificially created personas used to simulate real user behavior) for CX research and solution validation.

Additionally, AI tooling can render transformation roadmaps along with solution models to help align stakeholders and cross-functional governance team members around a common vision.

AI tools can help compose and intelligently assemble diverse digital experience modules – a more effective approach than putting all your IT investments in a single vendor's digital technology. As a result, the project can be progressively rolled out, with the most important functionality taking priority.

Modularity and componentization are key in this new world of AI-supported development and integration. GTM leaders can more easily and flexibly trial-run digital technology using AI while production versions are still being built – a clever way of eliminating the need for those “shadow” systems.

Lastly, by using AI to match customer profiles and critical needs, creative teams can more quickly fill the content supply chain with relevant messages, images, videos and tools to increase open rates, click-throughs, time-on-page engagement and ultimately campaign conversion.

AI can bridge the divide between strategy, technology and growth – currently major impediments to successful digital transformation. Integrating AI enablement into these domains makes sustained business reinvention possible while rewarding functional leadership for collaboration and for driving innovation and reinvention forward.